2016: The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Nearing the end of our list, we have Viet Thanh Nguyen, whose novel The Sympathizer took home or was nominated for just about every literary honor imaginable: the Edgar Award for First Novel, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, etc. “I haven’t read anything since Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four that illustrates so palpably how a patient tyrant, unmoored from all humane constraint, can reduce a man’s mind to liquid,” wrote the Washington Post. (Read our interview with Nguyen here.)
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