It’s a big news day for book awards.

Eleanor Catton has won the Booker Prize for her novel, The Luminaries. At 800+ pages, it’s a long book, but reviews say it’s a rollicking, plotty read that you should absolutely put on your to-read list. I know it just jumped to the top of mine.

Jhumpa Lahiri was shortlisted for the prize for The Lowland, but she’ll get another chance at award recognition in the National Book Award, the shortlist for which was announced today. Alongside Lahiri’s book are titles by James McBride, Rachel Kushner, Thomas Pynchon, and George Saunders. My money’s on Pynchon for Bleeding Edge—also on my reading list, which is getting perilously long—though Saunders is widely held to be the current master of the American short story, and his Tenth of December is a really excellent collection. If he were to get the award, that combined with Alice Munro’s Nobel would make this a killer year for the short story.

In still other awards news, the Guardian has awarded its provocatively-named “Not the Booker Prize” to Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life. This corrects a serious oversight on the part of the Booker committee, which didn’t even put the popular and acclaimed novel on its longlist. Atkinson’s a great pick for the award, a writer of great, entertaining, genre-influenced books that please audiences and critics alike—the very kind of writer I think award committees should be rewarding for their efforts.