The Southern California Independent Booksellers Association has just announced the finalists for this year’s book awards. It’s a strong field and the winners will be crowned Oct. 18 at the 2008 Authors Feast in Los Angeles.

Here’s the complete list:

Fiction:

City of Thieves, by David Benioff (Penguin)
Imagine Me and You, by Billy Mernit (Shaye Arehart Books)
The God of War, by Marisa Silver (Simon & Schuster)
Harry, Revised, by Mark Sarvas (Bloomsbury)
Winged Creatures, by Roy Freirich (St. Martin’s Griffin)

T. Jefferson Parker Mystery Award:

An Incomplete Revenge, by Jacqueline Winspear (Picador)
Chasing Darkness, by Robert Crais (Simon & Schuster)
Hollywood Crows, by Joseph Wambaugh (Little, Brown & Co.)
Judas Horse, by April Smith (Knopf)
Oscar Season, by Mary McNamara (Simon & Schuster)
Snitch Jacket, by Christopher Goffard (Overlook/Rookery)

Nonfiction:

All the Saints of the City of Angels, by J. Michael Walker (Heyday)
Big Daddy, by Bill Boyarsky (University of California Press)
Blue Eggs and Yellow Tomatoes, by Jeanne Kelley (Running Press)
Cancer on $5 a Day, by Robert Schimmel (De Capo Press)
Hometown Santa Monica, edited by Colleen Dunn Bates (Prospect Park Books)

Children’s Novels:
Nightmare Academy, by Dean Lorey (HarperCollins)
Pendragon Book Nine: Raven Rise, by D.J. MacHale (Simon & Schuster)
The Adoration of Jenna Fox, by Mary E. Pearson (Henry Holt and Company)
The Buddha’s Diamonds, by Carolyn Marsden (Candlewick Press)
The Hour of the Outlaw, by Maiya Williams (Amulet Books)

Children’s Picture Books:
Not a Stick, by Antoinette Portis (HarperCollins)
Our California, by Pam Munoz Ryan and illustrated by Rafael Lopez (Charlesbridge Publishing)
If Animals Kissed Good Night, by Ann Whitford Paul (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Pout - Pout Fish, by Dan Hanna (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
We Are The Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball, by Kadir Nelson (Hyperion)

All of the finalists are Southern California authors. To be eligible for the annual book awards, writers must live in the region, from Morro Bay south to Mexican border.

In other SoCal indie book news: Skylight Books of Los Feliz is expanding this week. The big move is Wednesday night when staffers, librarians, and volunteers will be moving books from Skylight’s arts sections — Art, Design, Architecture, Photography, Music, Film, Theatre, Fashion, Graphic Novels — to a newly renovated fourteen-hundred-square-foot storefront next door. It’s not a contiguous space, so the team will be pushing book carts, some borrowed from Vroman’s Bookstore, former bookstore owner Doug Dutton, and the Los Feliz Library, along the sidewalk on Vermont Avenue. Skylight Books reopens at noon on Thursday. Read more here.

*October Update: The winners.