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Southwest Books of the Year's top picks for titles published in 2005 are wide-ranging — they cover fiction and nonfiction, historical incidents and current events. Some break new ground, while others set old records straight. Two, for the first time, are self-published.

This year in first place is "The Hummingbird's Daughter" (Little, Brown, $24.95) by Luis Alberto Urrea. It is on the list of four of the five Southwest Books of the Year panelists. It is followed closely by "109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos" (Simon & Schuster, $26.95) by Jennet Conant, which appears on three lists.

This is the 29th edition of Southwest Books of the Year, which began as an annual guide published in the Arizona Daily Star. In 2000, it became a Tucson-Pima Public Library project, underwritten in part by the Friends of the Tucson-Pima Public Library.

This year's Top 10 titles were selected from 275-plus offerings.

Panelists meet regularly throughout the year to summarize, discuss and evaluate the new books as they become available. Panelists are Bill Broyles, a retired TUSD high school teacher, naturalist and author; Bruce Dinges, director of publications for the Arizona Historical Society; Patricia Etter, curator of the Labriola National American Indian Data Center at Arizona State University; W. David Laird, former head of the University of Arizona library system; and Richard Quartaroli, special collections librarian at Northern Arizona University and a veteran Colorado River runner. Deborah Bock, head of the Elizabeth Steinheimer collection of children's Southwest literature at TPPL, contributes a section on 2005 children's books.

Set in the decades before the 1910 Mexican revolution, "The Hummingbird's Daughter" is Urrea's warm, enthusiastic novel about a young Mexican healer, Teresita, the Saint of Cabora. It received four votes from the five-member Southwest Books panel.

In "109 East Palace," Conant has produced an eye-opening account of the dedicated race against time 60 years ago to produce the atomic bomb. She used unpublished memoirs of project members. Her grandfather, James B. Conant, was a participant. "109 East Palace" received three panel votes.

The 2005 Southwest Books of the Year folder, which contains comments on all of the winning titles plus notes on another 17 selected by the panelists, will be available in Tucson public libraries and bookstores beginning Friday and also will be distributed around the Southwest.

The complete list of titles soon will be available at www.tppl.org/pageturners online.