Top honors for the 2019 National Book Awards went to women. Susan Choi took home the fiction award and Sarah M. Broom the nonfiction award. The Los Angeles Times reported on the ceremony, held last night in New York.

Choi was recognized for her fifth novel, “Trust Exercise.” Set in the ’80s, the story centers on a group of friends at a performing arts high school. Choi’s other books include “A Person of Interest” and “American Woman,” the latter of which was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Fiction finalists included Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s “Sabrina & Corina: Stories,” a collection of stories centered on Latinas of indigenous ancestry, Laila Lalami’s “The Other Americans,” a murder mystery about a Moroccan immigrant, and Julia Phillips’ “Disappearing Earth,” which takes place in the aftermath of two young sisters disappearing on the shoreline of the Kamchatka peninsula of Russia.

Broom was celebrated for her debut memoir, “The Yellow House.” In it, she revisits 100 years of her family’s history, and explores their relationship to their house in New Orleans.

Tressie McMillan Cottom’s “Thick: And Other Essays,” an exploration of beauty, media, and money, and Carolyn Forché’s “What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance,” which sees its author’s life forever changed when a mysterious stranger appears on her doorstep, were among the nonfiction finalists.