Books in the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize series

""This is Hannah,"" Lynne Hugo introduces her chocolate Labrador retriever to an aged woman in a wheelchair at the Golden View Nursing Home. ""Would you like to pat her?"" ""I don't know,"" the woman responds warily. ""Dogs are complicated."" Where the Trail Grows Faint is the story of Hugo's experiences with Hannah and the elderly patients they visit.

Chronicles the author's travels in the rugged mountain forests of Japan's Shiretoko National Park, on a vision quest in Death Valley, and to the sacred waters of the Ganges. This book also features the landscape of his marriage, both its initial sweetness and its eventual failure.

In 1957, Joseph Spagna and five other men waited to board a bus called the Sunnyland. Their plan was: ride the bus together - three blacks and three whites - get arrested and take their case to the US Supreme Court. This book chronicles the story of an American family against the backdrop of one of the civil rights movement's lesser-known stories.

Reveals the promises and warnings of western boomtown life - stories of alcoholism, murder, betrayal, hope, and finally, redemption.

Traveling between the poles of Ohio and Vermont, childhood and motherhood, the author writes of a peripatetic family whose oddities make the quirks of a Thurber household seem downright subdued; and of a thirteen-year-old son as an unlikely companion through the torments of middle-aged dating.

There is no denying it: motherhood splits a woman's life forever, into a before and an after. To this doubled life Lisa Catherine Harper brings a wealth of feeling and a wry sense of humour, a will to understand the emotional and biological transformations that motherhood entails, and a narrative gift that any reader will enjoy.

A sometimes strange, sometimes lyrical, and often humorous attempt by an inveterate storyteller to recount "just things as they were"

The environment may surround us, but when that environment is a natural wonder like Yosemite National Park, it also reaches what's inside us. For Mark Liebenow, Yosemite did just that, and did so when he needed it most. In Mountains of Light, Liebenow takes us deep into the heart of this wilderness, introducing us to its grand and subtle marvels.

What would you be willing to do to save someone, perhaps someone you loved? On a moment's notice, for instance, would you lunge between that person and an assailant's knife strike? In that same situation, what would you be willing do for yourself? And what if there were nothing, ultimately, to be done? This book deals with these questions.