ICYMI: Our Carnegie Longlist Selections

By Rachel Tran | November 9 2023 | News

Congratulations to the 12 Penguin Random House titles honored on the 2024 Carnegie Medals for Excellence longlist! Please see the official release for more details.

The six-title shortlist—three each for the fiction and nonfiction medals—will be chosen from longlist titles and announced on November 14, 2023. The two medal winners will be announced by 2024 selection committee chair Aryssa Damron at the Reference and User Services Association’s (RUSA) Book and Media Awards livestreaming event, held during LibLearnX in Baltimore on Saturday, January 20, at 9:45 a.m. Eastern. A celebratory event, including presentations by the winners and a featured speaker, will take place in June 2024 at the American Library Association’s (ALA) Annual Conference in San Diego.

View a collection of our longlist.

Congratulations to our honored authors!

FICTION

Chain Gang All Stars
A Novel
A NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR • FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN FICTION • A READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Two top women gladiators fight for their freedom within a depraved private prison system not so far-removed from America’s own in this explosive, hotly-anticipated debut novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Friday Black • LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE

The Great Reclamation
A Novel
Set against a changing Singapore, a sweeping novel about one boy’s unique gifts and the childhood love that will complicate the fate of his community and country

The MANIAC
From one of contemporary literature’s most exciting new voices, a haunting story centered on the Hungarian polymath John von Neumann, tracing the impact of his singular legacy on the dreams and nightmares of the twentieth century and the nascent age of AI

The Bandit Queens
A Novel
A young Indian woman finds the false rumors that she killed her husband surprisingly useful—until other women in the village start asking for her help getting rid of their own husbands—in this razor-sharp debut. “Shroff captures the complexity of female friendship with acuity, wit, and a certain kind of magic irreverence…The Bandit Queens is tender, unpredictable, and brimming with laugh-out-loud moments.” –Téa Obreht, New York Times bestselling author of The Tiger’s Wife

NONFICTION

The Burning of the World
The Great Chicago Fire and the War for a City's Soul
WINNER OF THE MIDLAND AUTHORS AWARD FOR HISTORY • LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE • A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • The "illuminating" (New Yorker) story of the Great Chicago Fire: a raging inferno, a harrowing fight for survival, and the struggle for the soul of a city—told with the "the clarity—and tension—of a well-wrought military narrative" (Wall Street Journal)

Better Living Through Birding
Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
Central Park birder Christian Cooper takes us beyond the viral video that shocked a nation and into a world of avian adventures, global excursions, and the unexpected lessons you can learn from a life spent looking up at the birds

Poverty, by America
The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted reimagines the debate on poverty, making a “provocative and compelling” (NPR) argument about why it persists in America: because the rest of us benefit from it.

A Fever in the Heartland
The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them
"With meticulous detective work, Timothy Egan shines a light on one of the most sinister chapters in American history—how a viciously racist movement, led by a murderous conman, rose to power in the early twentieth century. A Fever in the Heartland is compelling, powerful, and profoundly resonant today." -- David Grann, author of THE WAGER and KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOONA historical thriller by the Pulitzer and National Book Award-winning author that tells the riveting story of the Klan's rise to power in the 1920s, the cunning con man who drove that rise, and the woman who stopped them.

The Country of the Blind
A Memoir at the End of Sight
A witty, winning, and revelatory personal narrative of the author’s transition from sightedness to blindness and his quest to learn about blindness as a rich culture all its own“The Country of the Blind is about seeing—but also about marriage and family and the moral and emotional challenge of accommodating the parts of ourselves that scare us. A warm, profound, and unforgettable meditation on how we adjust to new ways of being in the world.” —Rachel Aviv, author of Strangers to Ourselves

The 272
The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church
An absolutely essential addition to the history of the Catholic Church, whose involvement in New World slavery sustained the Church and, thereby, helped to entrench enslavement in American society.”—Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello and On Juneteenth New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • A New Yorker Best Book of the Year • Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal

Wonder Drug
The Secret History of Thalidomide in America and Its Hidden Victims
"A first-rate medical thriller and the searing account of a forgotten American tragedy" Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Empire of Pain A page-turning account of the most notorious drug of the twentieth century and the never-before-told story of its American survivors.

Project 562
Changing the Way We See Native America
A photographic and narrative celebration of contemporary Native American life and cultures, alongside an in-depth examination of issues that Native people face, by celebrated photographer and storyteller Matika Wilbur of the Swinomish and Tulalip Tribes.