Trust Exercise by Susan Choi has won the 2019 National Book Award for fiction, while Sarah M. Broom's memoir The Yellow House received the prize for nonfiction.
Trust Exercise is Choi's fifth book, and touches on sexual consent. The judges called the story "timely, mesmerizing, and in the end, unsettling." During Choi's acceptance speech, she said she finds it "an astonishing privilege that this is what I get to do for a living." Her novel American Woman was a 2004 Pulitzer Prize finalist.
The Yellow House centers around Broom's home in New Orleans, and how Hurricane Katrina forced her large family to split up. In her acceptance speech, Broom said her mother "was always wolfing down words, insatiable. Which is how I learned the way words were a kind of sustenance."
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Established in 1950, the National Book Award is one of the country's most prestigious literary prizes. This year's ceremony was hosted by actor and longtime Reading Rainbow host LeVar Burton.
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