The 2023 Gold Nautilus Book Award Winners
Natacha Belair’s A Stellar Purpose in the category Young Adult (YA) Fiction SciFi.
Ryan Lindner’s The Half-Known Life: What Matters Most When You’re Running Out of Time in the category Personal Growth & Self Help.
MEET AVERY, a well-rounded, fifteen-year-old girl who suddenly has the power to enter an alternate dimension where she discovers her life’s purpose-to protect animals and help save the planet before it’s too late. Thrilled to unmask the hidden mysteries found within this parallel universe but overwhelmed with the pressure of knowing that the fate of the animal kingdom is in her hands, Avery can finally breathe a sigh of relief when she learns that she is not alone.
Follow Avery as she tries to cope with this new reality while juggling the rest of her life-which includes investigating her nagging suspicion that the new owners of the local zoo are up to no good.
“I’m going down now,” I said to a young woman a few seconds before the darkness-my first cardiac arrest. As I returned to work as a behavioral coach, it became maddening to hear about all-consuming, everyday problems and misguided priorities while I fought to merely remain conscious.
The Half-Known Life challenges conventional thinking of success, identity, and personal change. Most often, truly profound change happens following events that shake someone to their core-a car accident, death of a family member, or cardiac arrest that pulls them into a moment of clarity. Priorities change when time becomes precious. Problems look different when you have no energy left to give them. Why wait until you’re burnt out or for a life-changing event to occur before getting real about your life? Who are you when all of the accolades and accomplishments are gone? What does how you manage your time say about what’s important to you-about what matters most? Get out of your head and get into your life, before it slips away.
The 2023 Silver Nautilus Book Award Winners
Ellen Sherman’s Into the Attic in the category Fiction (Large Press).
Elizabeth Leon’s Let Yourself Be Loved: Big Lessons From a Little Life in the category Death/Dying Grief & Loss Focused Topic: Memoir.
Amy Rothernberg’s You Finished Treatment, Now What? A Field guide for Cancer Survivors in the category Health, Healing & Wellness (large press).
Jenna Zark’s Crooked Lines: A Single Mom’s Jewish Journey in the category Focused Topic: Religious/Spiritual Memoir.
As Caroline, a 59-year-old writer, confronts her tragic past amidst the mountains of boxes in her attic, the ghosts of her parents and first husband appear. They had died in a car accident nearly twenty years earlier when her two children were small. It is the night before Thanksgiving, which Caroline and her second husband are hosting. At first, the ghosts say they can only meet with her-and only in the attic.
Caroline has things she wants to tell the ghosts, but they have come with stunning secrets of their own. How she straddles the worlds above and below creates dizzying conflicts until the ghosts are granted permission to join the holiday festivities. What happens next profoundly changes the lives of everyone present.
This engaging, often comic, novel explores the unreliability of memory, a reimagining of the afterlife, and how enduring love can help us move on.
LET YOURSELF BE LOVED EXPLORES THE HEART of a mother carrying a baby to term with the certainty of death. Diagnosed with trisomy 18, John Paul Raphael Leon lived only twenty-eight hours and ten minutes. Elizabeth Leon writes with unflinching honesty about the tsunami of grief and the exquisite agony of choosing to live and love in its wake. With vulnerability and courage, she surrenders to God’s plan and learns to embrace the fragility of life and the nearness of death. In the depression that follows her son’s death, Elizabeth Leon is forced to examine her own brokenness and confront the holy mystery of John Paul Raphael’s short and shining life: in the light of faith, our deepest sufferings are an invitation to joy. Let Yourself Be Loved is a road map to find that joy in the shadow of the valley of death.
You Finished Treatment, Now What? is a road map for lifestyle and natural medicine approaches to address health challenges that persist after cancer care, and to reduce the risk of recurrence. Written for cancer survivors/thrivers, those who care for them, as well as health-care providers, You Finished Treatment highlights the evidence for an integrative approach to healing. Dr. Amy Rothenberg, a licensed naturopathic doctor and cancer survivor/thriver herself, makes sense of an overwhelming topic, in a user-friendly accessible way, providing actionable information and inspiration.
While trying to sort out the answer to this question-along with the question of what being Jewish meant to her-Zark began writing. This book was born of the journey. Married to the cantor of a Jewish synagogue, trying to fit in to a life she hadn’t anticipated, Jenna Zark is completely unprepared when her marriage falls apart. Now staring down the prospect of being a single mom, Zark has to decide if and how to work with her former husband, now co-parent, to give her son a Jewish heritage. While the holidays and rituals in these pages are Jewish, the theme is universal and familiar for anyone who has ever experienced lifetransforming loss. Crooked Lines is Jenna Zark’s honest and compelling story of navigating divorce, single parenthood, interfaith marriage, and losing parents while holding on to one’s humor and traditions.