Indies Choice Book Awards

OK, so the finalists for the 2009 Indies Choice Awards have been announced. The awards—voted on by American Booksellers Association members, with the winners announced at BookExpo—cover seven categories: Best Indie Buzz Book (fiction), Best Conversation Starter (nonfiction), Best Author Discovery (debut), Best New Picture Book, Best YA Buzz Book, Most Engaging Author, and the Picture Book Hall of Fame.

The two categories that I’m most interested in are the Indie Buzz Book for works of fiction and the Best Author Discovery for best debut. Here are your finalists:

Best Indie Buzz Book (Fiction)

• City of Thieves, by David Benioff (Viking)
• The Given Day, by Dennis Lehane (Morrow)
• The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows (Dial)
• Netherland, by Joseph O’Neill (Pantheon)
• People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks (Viking)
• Unaccustomed Earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri (Knopf)

Best Author Discovery (Debut)

• Child 44, by Tom Rob Smith (Grand Central)
• The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson (Knopf)
• Mudbound, by Hillary Jordan (Algonquin)
• The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, by David Wroblewski (Ecco)
• The Story of Forgetting, by Stefan Merrill Block (Random House)
• White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga (Free Press)

We’re big fans of independent bookstores (all the above links go to the Harvard Book Store, which we’ve decided to support this month), and I think it’s great that there’s a set of book awards given out by independent booksellers. This isn’t exactly the indie list I was hoping for (I like my bookseller reading tastes to be more eclectic, less corporate), but at least there’s one translation: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which was translated from the Swedish by Reg Keeland.