Today in Bookish and Literary History, September 20

2001 Atonement by Ian McEwan (UK)

Set in three time periods, 1935 England, Second World War England and France, and present-day England, it covers an upper-class girl's half-innocent mistake that ruins lives, her adulthood in the shadow of that mistake, and a reflection on the nature of writing.

• Shortlisted for the 2001 Booker Prize for Fiction
• Shortlisted for the 2001 James Tait Black Memorial Prize
• Shortlisted for the 2001 Whitbread Novel Award
• Won the 2002 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction
• Won the 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
• Won the 2002 WH Smith Literary Award
• Won the 2002 Boeke Prize
• Won the 2004 Santiago Prize for the European Novel

2022 The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li

A magnificent, beguiling tale winding from the postwar rural provinces to Paris, from an English boarding school to the quiet Pennsylvania home where a woman can live without her past, The Book of Goose is a story of disturbing intimacy and obsession, of exploitation and strength of will, by the celebrated author Yiyun Li.

• Won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
• Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction

2022 Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm by Laura Warrell

It’s 2013, and Circus Palmer, a forty-year-old Boston-based trumpet player and old-school ladies’ man, lives for his music and refuses to be tied down. Before a gig in Miami, he learns that the woman who is secretly closest to his heart, the free-spirited drummer Maggie, is pregnant by him. Instead of facing the necessary conversation, Circus flees, setting off a chain of interlocking revelations from the various women in his life.

2025 The Resident by KJ Kalis

Everyone makes mistakes in residency.

But mine might kill someone.