After a month of victories and losses and thrilling deliberation, the Morning News‘s Tournament of Books has chosen a champion: The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson!

The harrowing, North Korea–set epic beat out The Fault in Our Stars by John Green in the final round by a score of 14 to 3. Says Lev Grossman, one of the judges, “The scope of what Johnson did in this book is just stunning—the extremes of emotion he puts his characters through, the beauty and hideousness of the world he builds, the range and diversity of the ideas he manages to bind into one single story.”

Congratulations to Johnson, whom we interviewed about the winning novel in 2012.