Things We Lost to the Water by Eric Nguyen (Knopf) has won the ninth annual Crook's Corner Book Prize, which carries an award of $5,000 and honors the best debut novel set in the American South. Organizers said the book is about "an immigrant Vietnamese family who settles in New Orleans as they search for identity--as individuals and as a family--and struggle to remain connected to one another as their lives are inexorably reshaped."
Judge Ron Rash said, "There is much to admire in Nguyen's novel, but two aspects stand out to me. The first is his ability to reveal the inner lives of his characters. Their motivations and actions are distinctly individual, but they always feel true to the vagaries of the human heart. Equally impressive, and rarer in a first novel, is the novel's superb structure, which moves the characters and the reader toward a climax that is both surprising and inevitable."