NEW YORK, NY – February 27, 2008 –Barnes & Noble Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world’s largest bookseller, announced this afternoon that Chaplain Kate Braestrup’s moving memoir, Here If You Need Me (Little, Brown), and Joshua Ferris’ perceptive first novel, Then We Came to the End (Little, Brown), have been named the winners of the 15th annual “Discover Great New Writers Awards,” the first program by a bookseller to recognize excellence in literature.  Each writer was awarded a cash prize of $10,000, and a full year of additional marketing and advertising support. 

West Point Professor Elizabeth Samet’s Soldier’s Heart (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a meditation on the power of literature, and war veteran Matthew Eck’s harrowing debut novel, The Farther Shore (Milkweed Editions), took second place honors, each receiving $5,000.  Wall Street Journal Correspondent Yaroslav Trofimov’s military history, The Siege of Mecca (Doubleday), and Vendela Vida’s unsettling and atmospheric second novel, Let The Northern Lights Erase Your Name (Ecco), won third place honors, each receiving $2,500.  The awards were presented this afternoon at a private ceremony, and the winners and finalists will read from their work tonight, February 27, at 7:00 p.m. at the Lincoln Triangle Barnes & Noble (1972 Broadway at 66th Street) in New York City.

Here If You Need Me, Kate Braestrup’s nonfiction debut, is a heartbreaking memoir.  As a young widow with four children, Braestrup recounts her decision to pursue her deceased husband’s quest to work as a chaplain for the Maine warden service and delivers stories from the field, full of compassion, honesty, and wisdom.  Jurist Rob Kurson offered the following comment on the prizewinner: “This memoir captures that most beautiful and singular of human attributes – our instinct to stand by another who is hurting… Kate Braestrup sees life – and then walks into it – for the wonderful and terrible and complex thing it so often is.  The writing, like the author’s heart, is at once profound, simple, and elegant.”

Writers participating in this year’s nonfiction jury panel included Lucinda Franks, author of the memoir, My Father’s Secret War; Rob Kurson, author of the bestselling Shadow Divers and the more recent, Crashing Through; and Dr. Perri Klass, whose book, Treatment Kind and Fair, was published last year.

The fiction winner, Then We Came to the End, is Joshua Ferris’ debut novel, the tale of a group of malcontented employees at a declining Chicago ad agency.  Fiction jurist John Burnham Schwartz had these words for the prizewinner: “It’s a blisteringly funny first novel that speaks in a rollicking chorus of complaint and misdirection from within the vast corporate beehive, nailing the species, while never ceasing to recognize the human and particular.  For all the satire, one finishes this book strangely and urgently moved both by the loss of community in our age, and the need for it, now, more than ever.  Joshua Ferris is uncommonly wise, and brimming with talent.”

Writers on the fiction jury panel included Louisa Ermelino, the author of Joey Dee Gets Wise; John Burnham Schwartz, whose novel Reservation Road was released as a major motion picture last fall and whose novel, The Commoner, was published last month; and Rupert Thomson, whose most recent novel, Death of a Murderer, was published last summer.

The Discover Awards honor the works of exceptionally talented writers featured in the Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” program during the previous year.  In 2007, the Discover Great New Writers program featured the work of 67 previously unheralded fiction and non-fiction writers.