Matt Haig, Barack Obama, and Brit Bennett are among the winners of this year’s Goodreads Choice Awards.
The winners of the prizes, which are voted on by readers, were announced on Tuesday.
Haig took home the fiction award for his novel The Midnight Library, which Goodreads praised as a “wildly inventive blend of literary and speculative fiction.” Haig’s victory was the closest in the history of the awards; he beat out Fredrik Backman’s Anxious People by five votes. Jeanine Cummins’ controversial American Dirt came in third.
Obama easily won the memoir and autobiography prize for A Promised Land, scoring more than 30,000 votes over the runner-up, Glennon Doyle’s Untamed.
Bennett’s The Vanishing Half won in the historical fiction category, while Lucy Foley took home the mystery and thriller prize for The Guest List. Sarah J. Mass was named the winner in the fantasy category for Crescent City, with Silvia Moreno-Garcia winning the horror prize for Mexican Gothic.
Christopher Paolini won the science fiction category for To Sleep in a Sea of Stars, and Jennifer L. Armentrout prevailed in the romance category for From Blood and Ash.
Other winners included Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi for Stamped (nonfiction), Isabel Wilkerson for Caste (history and biography), Kiley Reid for Such a Fun Age (debut novel), and Elizabeth Acevedo for Clap When You Land (young adult fiction).
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
