Memento Park by Mark Sarvas (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) has won the Association of Jewish Libraries' Jewish Fiction Award, which includes a $1,000 cash prize. The association said that the protagonist in the novel "becomes aware of a valuable painting believed to have been stolen from his family in World War II. In order to recover the mysterious work, he must reconnect with his father, his family history, and his own Judaism."
Yermiyahu Ahron Taub, chairperson of the award committee, added: "Dramatically paced and laced with mordant wit, Mark Sarvas has fashioned a meditation on art, family, faith, and Jewish history in the form of a suspenseful intellectual thriller."
The association also named two honor books:
The Cloister by James Carroll (Nan Talese). "The timeless love story of the discredited medieval French scholar Peter Abelard and his intellectual paramour Héloïse, and its impact on a priest and a Holocaust survivor in post-World War II Manhattan."
The Fourth Corner of the World by Scott Nadelson (Engine Books). "The characters in [this] short story collection... abandon their lands of origin, sever their roots, and distance themselves from the people they once were."
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A longlist has been released for the $50,000 Simpson Family Literary Prize, recognizing "an author of fiction in the middle of a burgeoning career." The shortlist will be announced in early March and a winner named in early April. The prize is administered by the Simpson Project, which is a collaboration of the Lafayette Library and Learning Center Foundation and the University of California, Berkeley, English Department. Check out the complete longlist here.