A couple of awards that weren’t announced at Friday night’s ABIA Awards were the ABIA & Booktopia People’s Choice Awards.

We asked you to vote for your favourite fiction and children’s books, and we received a huge response. Thanks to everyone who voted!

After thousands of votes cast, we’re proud to announce the winners of the inaugural ABIA & Booktopia People’s Choice Awards.

Fiction Book of the Year

Burial Rites

by Hannah Kent

Winner of the ABIA & Booktopia People’s Choice Award

In northern Iceland, 1829, Agnes Magnusdottir is condemned to death for her part in the brutal murder of two men. Agnes is sent to wait on the farm of District Officer Jon Jonsson and his family, who are horrified and avoid Agnes. Only Toti, the young assistant reverend appointed as Agnes’s spiritual guardian, is compelled to try to understand her.

As the summer months fall away to winter, Agnes’s story begins to emerge. And as the days to her execution draw closer, the question burns: did she or didn’t she?

Based on a true story, Burial Rites is a deeply moving novel about freedom and the ways we will risk everything for love. In beautiful, cut-glass prose, Hannah Kent portrays Iceland’s formidable landscape, and asks: how can one woman endure when her life depends upon the stories told by others?

Grab a copy of Burial Rites here

Children’s Book of the Year

The 39-Storey Treehouse

by Andy Griffiths

Winner of the ABIA & Booktopia People’s Choice Award

Andy and Terry’s amazing treehouse has 13 new levels including a chocolate waterfall, a non-erupting active volcano, an opera house, a baby-dinosaur petting zoo, Andy and Terry’s Believe it or Else! museum, a not-very-merry merry-go-round, a boxing elephant called the Trunkinator, an X-Ray room, a disco with light-up dance floor, the world’s scariest roller-coaster and a top secret 39th level that hasn’t even been finished yet!

Well, what are you waiting for?

Come on up!

Grab a copy of The 39-Storey Treehouse here

Congratulations to Hannah Kent and Andy Griffiths. Click here for a full list of winners from the Australian Book Industry Awards.

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About the Contributor

Andrew Cattanach

Andrew Cattanach is a regular contributor to The Booktopia Blog. He has been shortlisted for The Age Short Story Prize and was named a finalist for the 2015 Young Bookseller of the Year Award. He enjoys reading, writing and sleeping, though finds it difficult to do them all at once.

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