National Book Award Predictions

Several Best Books list have just been released. Since the National Book Awards will be announced on Wednesday evening, we decided to use the lists to try to predict the winners in fiction and nonfiction.

Library Journal’s Best Books list was released late yesterday. It follows the Amazon Editors picks of 100 favorites of 2015 in ranked order, Oprah’s list of Top Ten Favories, and PW‘s picks of 150 Best Books.

We’ve compared the top ten from all of these sources on the downloadable spreadsheet below:

Best Books — Top Ten

Based on that, the winners will be:

between-the-world  furies

Nonfiction — Ta-Nehisi Coates, , Between the World and Me. (PRH/ Spiegel & Grau) — Picked by all four sources. The number 2 Amazon Editors Pick.

Fiction — Lauren Groff,  Fates and Furies (PRH/Riverhead Books) — The number 1 Amazon Editors Pick and in LJ’s top ten (but not in PW‘s Top Ten. In fact, PW is a holdout on this title, which isn’t among any of their other picks)

Note to those placing bets: this approach would not have worked last year. The fiction winner appeared on only one of these top ten lists and the nonfiction winner didn’t appear on any of them.

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