Northwest author wins National Book Award

Seattle author Timothy Egan has won the National Book Award for nonfiction for his harrowing account of America's Dust Bowl catastrophe, "The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl."

The dust storms that terrorized America's High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since, and the stories of the people that held on have never been fully told. Pulitzer Prize?winning New York Times journalist and author Timothy Egan follows a half-dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, going from sod homes to new framed houses to huddling in basements with the windows sealed by damp sheets in a futile effort to keep the dust out. He follows their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding black blizzards, crop failure, and the deaths of loved ones.

Spokane author Jess Walter was a finalist in the fiction category for his post-9/11 novel, "The Zero"; Richard Powers' "The Echo Maker" won in that category.

From its opening pages-when hero cop Brian Remy wakes up to find he's shot himself in the head-novelist Jess Walter takes us on a harrowing tour of a city and a country shuddering through the aftershocks of a devastating terrorist attack. As the smoke slowly clears, Remy finds that his memory is skipping, lurching between moments of lucidity and days when he doesn't seem to be living his own life at all. From a novelist of astounding talent, The Zero is an extraordinary story of how our trials become our transgressions, of how we forgive ourselves and whether or not we should.

Both books are available at northwest-books.com.