Adult Massachusetts Book Awards 2025

"The year is 1087, and a pox is sweeping through the Italian port city of Bari. When a lowly monk is visited by Saint Nicholas in his dreams, he interprets the vision as a call to action. But his superiors, and the power brokers they serve, have different plans for the tender-hearted Brother Nicephorus. Enter Tyun, a charismatic treasure hunter renowned for "liberating" holy relics from their tombs. The six-hundred-year-old bones of Saint Nicholas...

"Ani, journeying across a great distance accompanied by a stolen kitten, meets many people along her way, but her encounters only convince her that she is meant to keep searching. Annamae, journeying from childhood to young adulthood alongside her mother, older brother, and the denizens of her Manhattan neighborhood, never outgrows her yearning for a friend she cannot describe. From their different worlds, Annamae and Ani reach across the divide,...

"In 1950s Tehran, seven-year-old Ellie lives in grand comfort until the untimely death of her father, forcing Ellie and her mother to move to a tiny home downtown. Lonely and bearing the brunt of her mother's endless grievances, Ellie dreams of a friend to alleviate her isolation. Luckily, on the first day of school, she meets Homa, a kind, passionate girl with a brave and irrepressible spirit. Together, the two girls play games, learn to cook in...

Set against the backdrop of developing modern China, a new novel is a coming-of-age tale, part family and social drama, as it follows two generations searching for belonging and opportunity in a rapidly changing world. Shanghai, 2007: Fourteen-year-old Alva has always longed for more. Raised by her American expat mother, she's never known her Chinese father, and is certain a better life awaits them in America. But when her mother announces her engagement...

"From the New York Times best-selling author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy, a novel about a young woman whose gift of second sight complicates her coming of age in late 19th century Scotland. Growing up in the care of her grandparents on Belhaven farm, Lizzie Craig discovers at a young age that she can see into the future. Her gift of sight is selective--she doesn't, for instance, see that she has an older sister who will come to join the family on...

"From the author of When Franny Stands Up comes a genre-bending story told in linked obituaries and newsfeeds over three hundred years about one AI woman grappling with her grief after the mysterious death of her human daughter, and wondering what it really means to be human. What will it take for the death of Poppy Fletcher to make sense? Poppy Fletcher dies too young, and the entire world is eager to accept it and move on. Except for her mother,...

"A guide to the core issues driving the education wars, offering essential information about issues, actors, and potential outcomes"-- Provided by publisher.

"A radical proposal for healing the relationship between humans and forests through responsible, sustainable use of local and regional wood in home building. American homes are typically made of lumber and plywood delivered by a global system of ruthless extraction, or of concrete and steel, which are even worse for the planet. Wood is often the most sustainable material for building, but we need to protect diverse forests as much as we desperately...

"Black resistance to white supremacy is often reduced to a simple binary, between Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s nonviolence and Malcolm X's "by any means necessary." In We Refuse, historian Kellie Carter Jackson urges us to move past this false choice, offering an unflinching examination of the breadth of Black responses to white oppression, particularly those pioneered by Black women. The dismissal of "Black violence" as an illegitimate form of resistance...

"In his timely historical work The Stolen Wealth of Slavery, Emmy Award-nominated journalist David Montero follows the trail of the massive wealth amassed from the transatlantic slave trade by Northern corporations in America. It has long been maintained by many that the North wasn't complicit in the horrors of slavery, that the forced bondage and exploitation of Black people was primarily a Southern phenomenon. Yet this isn't true: In fact, popular...