2025 Book Awards Shortlist

The Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association (PNBA) is a non-profit association of independent bookstores from five Northwest states, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Alaska and British Columbia. The Association produces educational and promotional events and materials for its members and offers literacy, free speech, and author promotional vehicles through its member stores.

Since 1965, our annual Book Awards have recognized such luminary figures in Northwest literature as Ivan Doig, Ursula K. Le Guin, David James Duncan, Cheryl Strayed, Jonathan Evison, Molly Gloss, Chuck Palahniuk, and Brian Doyle. Many of these authors were honored by PNBA before they received national attention. A history of past winners of the Pacific Northwest Book Award can be viewed on the Book Awards homepage.

PNBA's Awards Committee is comprised of nine volunteer booksellers from throughout our member region. This year's Committee considered almost 300 nominated titles published during October 2023-November 2024 for the 2025 award.

​These titles, announced in early November, comprise the list from which up to six 2025 winners will be selected.
Winners be announced in early January 2025 and promoted by our member stores during the winter and spring of 2025.
Eve
How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

Cat Bohannon
Seattle, WA

"...Eve recasts the traditional story of evolutionary biology by placing women at its center..."
​--Sarah Lyall, The New York Times

Alfred A. Knopf
It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over

Anne de Marcken
Olympia, WA

Our heroine is alive in the afterlife and notes every bizarre detail while she loses parts of her body during her journey and carries an opinionated crow in her chest.

New Directions Publishing
Log Life

Amy Hevron
Seattle, WA

When an old tree falls to the forrest floor, a new life begins for the surrounding ecosystem, including food for seedlings, creatures, and fungi and shelter for animals. 
​
Simon & Schuster
Coexistence
Stories
​
Billy-Ray Belcourt
Vancouver, BC

A collection of philosophical undergirding, poetic demand, and the complex relationships between aesthetics and ethics.

WW Norton
The Liberators
A Novel

E. J. Koh
Seattle, WA

A young woman in South Korea marries, loses her father, flees to California with her husband and son, and, while grieving her past, is drawn into an illicit affair that echos for generations.

Tin House
Salmon, Cedar, Rock & Rain
Washington's Olympic Peninsula

Tim McNulty
Sequim, WA

Tim McNulty dives into the complex and ongoing story of the Olympic Peninsula, while writers from Tribes and Nations share some of their own history, stories and perspectives.

Mountaineers Books
Becoming Little Shell
A Landless Indian's Journey Home

Chris La Tray
Missoula, MT

After his father's death, Chris La Tray explores his previously unknown Indigenous heritage, and comes to embrace his full identity with the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians.

Milkweed Editions
Feeding Ghosts
A Graphic Memoir

Tessa Hulls
Seattle, WA

Tessa Hulls exposes the fear and trauma that haunt generations by telling the story of three women in her family: her Chinese grandmother, her mother, and herself.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Touching the Art

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Seattle, WA

Queer icon and activist Mattilda Berstien Sycamore explores what art can and cannot do as she sorts though her grandmother's paintings while also in search of an embodied truth.

Soft Skull Press
Wild and Distant Seas

Tara Karr Roberts
Moscow, ID

Evangeline Hussey has made a home for herself on Nantucket, after her husband, Hosea was lost at sea. She houses a young sailor named Ishmael before he sails away with Ahab to hunt the white whale, and from there, her own story continues.

WW Norton
We Were the Universe

Kimberly King Parsons
Portland, OR

A young mother named Kit tries to settle back into routine in her Dallas home, but her recent trip to the idyllic Montana Mountains brings up distracting memories of everything she's lost over the years, but most of all her sister, Julie.

Alfred A. Knopf
Table Titans Club

Scott Kurtz
Bothell, WA

Valeria Winters is a nerd who has a hard time making friends, but finally she's found her place with the school's tabletop gaming club. But she'll have to roll a nat 20 to keep her friends together both in the game and real life.

Holiday House