Abby Award Nominees Announced

Posted on February 13, 1998

The American Booksellers Association (ABA) announced the nominees for the 1998 American Booksellers Book of the Year (ABBY) Award. The final list of five books in both adult trade and children's categories, nominated by bookstore members of the ABA, represent titles that booksellers most enjoyed hand-selling during the past year.

The 1998 adult nominees are:
-- All Over but the Shoutin', Rick Bragg (Pantheon Books)
-- At Home in Mitford, Jan Karon (Viking Penguin, cloth; Lion Publishing and Penguin Books, paper)
-- Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier (Atlantic Monthly Press)
-- Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster, Jon Krakauer (Villard Books)
-- Memoirs of a Geisha: A Novel, Arthur Golden (Knopf)

The 1998 children's nominees are:
-- The Gardener, Sarah Stewart, illustrated by David Small (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
-- The Hat, Jan Brett (The Putnam Publishing Group)
-- To Market, To Market, Anne Miranda, illustrated by Janet Stevens (Harcourt Brace & Company)
-- Toot & Puddle, Holly Hobbie (Little, Brown & Company)
-- When Jessie Came Across the Sea, Amy Hest, illustrated by P.J. Lynch (Candlewick Press)

Booksellers will vote on the nominees in a mail-in ballot this spring, and the winners will be announced in May. The award itself -- $5,000 cash prizes and engraved Tiffany glass prisms -- will be presented to the winning author in both the adult and children's categories at the BookExpo America (BEA) trade show (May 30 - June 1) in Chicago. The remaining four nominees in each category will be awarded the title of ABBY Honor Book.

Founded in 1900, the American Booksellers Association is a not-for-profit trade organization devoted to meeting the needs of its core members -- independently-owned bookstores with retail store front locations -- through advocacy, education, research, and information dissemination. The ABA actively supports free speech literacy, and programs that encourage children to read. The Association -- headquartered in Tarrytown, New York, and on the Web at http://www.bookweb.org -- also hosts the annual ABA Convention in conjunction with BookExpo America each spring.