The Hidden Palace is a 2021 National Jewish Book Award winner!

I’m absolutely thrilled to announce that The Hidden Palace has received the 2021 National Jewish Book Award in the Book Club category!

From the award page:

Inau­gu­rat­ed in 1950, the Nation­al Jew­ish Book Awards is the longest-run­ning North Amer­i­can awards pro­gram of its kind and is rec­og­nized as the most pres­ti­gious. The Awards are intend­ed to rec­og­nize authors, and encour­age read­ing, of out­stand­ing Eng­lish-lan­guage books of Jew­ish interest.

Awards are pre­sent­ed in over eigh­teen cat­e­gories, and the win­ning authors are cel­e­brat­ed at an annu­al gala in the year fol­low­ing the pub­li­ca­tion of the books under con­sid­er­a­tion. Past notable win­ners include Chaim Grade, Deb­o­rah Lip­stadt, Bernard Mala­mud, Michael Oren, Chaim Potok, Philip Roth, Elie Wiesel, Jonathan Safran Foer, Deb­o­rah Dash Moore, and Sandy Eisen­berg Sasso.

And the Jewish Book Council’s review by Matthue Roth has this to say about The Hidden Palace:

Every time I pick up Dick­ens, I remem­ber how his works were orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in install­ments, how each would end on a cliffhang­er, whip­ping read­ers into a fren­zy that sent them back for the next chap­ter. Wecker’s chap­ters oper­ate on a sim­i­lar lev­el, weav­ing for­ward a grand but slow-mov­ing mas­ter plan through a vast tapes­try of char­ac­ters — from an upper-class daugh­ter of priv­i­lege set afire (both metaphor­i­cal­ly and lit­er­al­ly) by the jinni’s touch; to a teenage West­ern Union mes­sage boy; to a New World golem, cre­at­ed in the wake of the old one, with a dif­fer­ent mis­sion and a sim­i­lar exis­ten­tial cri­sis — teas­ing out a greater pic­ture we don’t see until the novel’s end.

Congratulations to all the winners and nominees!

Link: National Jewish Book Awards