The finalists

Here are the National Book Critics Circle finalists. For more information, go to http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com.

Nonfiction

"The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq" by Patrick Cockburn (Verso).

"The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe V. Wade" by Ann Fessler (Penguin Press).

"The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals" by Michael Pollan (Penguin Press).

"Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution" by Simon Schama (Ecco).

"The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew and the Heart of the Middle East" by Sandy Tolan (Bloomsbury).

Fiction

"Half of a Yellow Sun" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Knopf).

"The Inheritance of Loss" by Kiran Desai (Grove/Atlantic).

"What Is the What" by Dave Eggers (McSweeney's).

"The Lay of the Land" by Richard Ford (Knopf).

"The Road" by Cormac McCarthy (Knopf).

Memoir/Autobiography

"The Afterlife" by Donald Antrim (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

"Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic" by Alison Bechdel (Houghton Mifflin).

"Stuart: A Life Backwards" by Alexander Masters (Delacorte).

"The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million" by Daniel Mendelsohn (HarperCollins).

"Strange Piece of Paradise" by Terri Jentz (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

Poetry

"My Brother is Getting Arrested Again" by Daisy Fried (University of Pittsburgh Press).

"Tom Thomson in Purgatory" by Troy Jollimore (Margie/Intuit House).

"Poems (1945-1971)" by Miltos Sachtouris (Archipelego Books).

"Ooga-Booga" by Frederick Seidel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

"Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems" by W.D. Snodgrass (BOA Editions).

Criticism

"While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West From Within" by Bruce Bawer (Doubleday).

"Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays" by Frederick Crews (Shoemaker & Hoard).

"Breaking the Spell: Religion As A Natural Phenomenon" by Daniel Dennett (Viking).

"On Looking: Essays" by Lia Purpura (Sarabande Books).

"Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences" by Lawrence Wechsler (McSweeney's).

Biography

"The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher" by Debby Applegate (Doubleday).

"At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968" by Taylor Branch (Simon & Schuster).

"Flaubert: A Biography" by Frederick Brown (Little, Brown).

"James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon" by Julie Phillips (St.Martin's Press).

"A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History's Greatest Traveler" by Jason Roberts (HarperCollins).

Mary Ann Gwinn, Seattle Times books editor