With selections that should cause less controversy than this year's National Book Awards choices, the Joseph-Beth Group, which bills itself as "the country's largest independent bookselling group," has announced its first Book of the Year Awards program. The winners were chosen in four categories by booksellers at the six Joseph-Beth and Davis-Kidd bookstores in Kentucky, Tennessee and Ohio. (Another Joseph-Beth store opens later this month in Pittsburgh, Pa.) The titles will be decorated with special gold foil seals and be displayed prominently in each store. A congratulatory gift has also been sent to each author.

The "best of the best from this publishing season" are:

Fiction:Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (Penguin Press)

Nonfiction:Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris (Little, Brown)

Kids' Illustrated:Knuffle Bunny by Mo Willems (Hyperion Books for Children)

Kids' Non-Illustrated:Eragon by Christopher Paolini (Knopf Books for Young Readers)

Michele Sulka, Joseph-Beth's v-p of marketing, credited the idea for the awards to Wendi Gratz, a Davis-Kidd manager who left the company last month to become a children's rep at Random House. At BEA, Gratz noticed the impact well-known stores like Tattered Cover have on books they champion, Sulka said, and proposed the awards as a way for Joseph-Beth to push books to customers—and publishers—in a more prominent manner. "It's a nice way to pick out our favorites and make sure everyone else loves them, too," Sulka said.

During the summer, the company solicited nominations of titles published during the past year, and booksellers—but no corporate staff—voted from a shortlist. The stores are setting up bigger displays and are "hoping to get local press, too," Sulka said. Coincidentally, each winning author has appeared at at least one Joseph-Beth or Davis-Kidd store. "Maybe this will draw them back for their next books," Sulka added.

The fiction winner, Shadow of the Wind, has already benefited from some passionate handselling at Joseph-Beth. A bookseller in the company's Cincinnati store handsold "hundreds and hundreds of copies of the book when it was a $30 hardcover by no one anyone had heard of," Sulka said.

Joseph-Beth, which was founded in 1986 and won Publishers Weekly's Bookseller of the Year in 1996, plans to give the awards annually.