This year’s Medal winner is Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village by Laura Amy Schlitz. Twenty-three individual, but connected, narratives introduce children to a diversity of young characters from thirteenth-century England. Schlitz, a school librarian, wrote the book as the basis for a theater production with enough distinct characters for each child to have a separate role.

The Inheritance of Loss PS 3554 E82 I54 2006 Winner of the 2006 Booker Prize, this novel chronicles the lives of a retired judge living in the Himalayas, his son, his orphaned granddaughter, and his cook as they “struggle with their cultural identity and the forces of modernization while trying to maintain their emotional connection to one another.”