Andrew Delbanco, Melville:  His World and Work (Alfred A. Knopf)

Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals:  The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (Simon & Schuster)

Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, Mencken:  The American Iconoclast (Oxford University Press)

Hilary Spurling, Matisse the Master:  A Life of Henri Matisse, the Conquest of Colour, 1909-1954 (Alfred A. Knopf)

Steven Watts, The People's Tycoon:  Henry Ford and the American Century (Alfred A. Knopf)

Steve Bogira, Courtroom 302:  A Year Behind the Scenes in an American Criminal Courthouse (Alfred A. Knopf)

Kurt Eichenwald, Conspiracy of Fools:  A True Story (Broadway Books)

Jonathan Harr, The Lost Painting (Random House)

Anthony Shadid, Night Draws Near:  Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War (Henry Holt)

John Updike, Still Looking:  Essays on American Art (Alfred A. Knopf)

E.L. Doctorow, The March:  A Novel (Random House)

Mary Gaitskill, Veronica (Pantheon Books)

Gabriel García Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores [translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman] (Alfred A. Knopf)

Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down (Riverhead Books)

Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore [translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel] (Alfred A. Knopf)

Kirstin Allio, Garner (Coffee House Press)

Karen Fisher, A Sudden Country:  A Novel (Random House)

Olga Grushin, The Dream Life of Sukhanov (Marian Wood/G.P. Putnam's Sons)

Uzodinma Iweala, Beasts of No Nation:  A Novel (HarperCollins)

Marlon James, John Crow's Devil (Akashic Books)

Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 1933-1939 (Penguin Press)

Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Armies:  The Fall of British Asia, 1941-1945 (Belknap Press/Harvard University Press)

Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire=s Slaves (Houghton Mifflin)

Tony Judt, Postwar:  A History of Europe Since 1945 (Penguin Press)

Michael Connelly, The Lincoln Lawyer:  A Novel (Little, Brown)

James Crumley, The Right Madness (Viking)

John Harvey, Ash & Bone (Harcourt)

Robert Littell, Legends:  A Novel of Dissimulation (Overlook Press)

Peter Robinson, Strange Affair (William Morrow/HarperCollins)

Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven:  Poems (Alfred A. Knopf)

Gail Mazur, Zeppo's First Wife:  New and Selected Poems (University of Chicago Press)

Marilyn Nelson, The Cachoeira Tales and Other Poems (Louisiana State University Press)

Lucia Perillo, Luck Is Luck:  Poems (Random House)

Donald Revell, Pennyweight Windows:  New & Selected Poems (Alice James Books)

Sean B. Carroll, Endless Forms Most Beautiful:  The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom (W.W. Norton)

Mariana Gosnell, Ice:  The Nature, the History, and the Uses of an Astonishing Substance (Alfred A. Knopf)

Brad Matsen, Descent:  The Heroic Discovery of the Abyss (Pantheon Books)

Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science (Basic Books)

Diana Preston, Before the Fallout:  From Marie Curie to Hiroshima (Walker & Company)

John Green, Looking for Alaska (Dutton/Penguin Young Readers Group)

Margo Lanagan, Black Juice (Eos/HarperCollins Children's Books)

Per Nilsson, You & You & You [translated from the Swedish by Tara Chace] (Front Street/Boyds Mills Press)

Andreas Steinhöfel, The Center of the World [translated from the German by Alisa Jaffa] (Delacorte Press/Random House Children's Books)

Markus Zusak, I Am the Messenger (Alfred A. Knopf/Random House Children's Books)