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2022 National Book Award Finalists

The 2022 National Book Award Finalists were recently announced. Think you’ll have time to read all 25 finalists before the winners are announced on November 16th?

The rabbit hutch : a novel

The rabbit hutch : a novel

by Tess Gunty

Finalist: National Book Award for Fiction
 
Set in the post-industrial Midwest, this story of loneliness and community, entrapment and freedom, follows Blandine, who lives with three other teens in a run-down apartment building known as the Rabbit Hutch, as she embarks on a quest for transcendence that culminates in a shocking act of violence. 
The birdcatcher

The birdcatcher

by Gayl Jones
 
Finalist: National Book Award for Fiction
 
On the white-washed island of Ibiza, the narrator, writer Amanda Wordlaw, describes in great detail her peculiar relationship with her closet friend, a gifted sculptor, who is repeatedly institutionalized for trying to kill a husband who never leaves her.
The haunting of Hajji Hotak : and other stories

The haunting of Hajji Hotak : and other stories

by Jamil Jan Kochai
 
Finalist: National Book Award for Fiction
 
The Pen/Hemingway finalist breathes life into his contemporary Afghan characters as he explores heritage, the ghosts of war and home--the one that speaks to the immediate political landscape we reckon with today.
All this could be different

All this could be different

by Sarah Thankam Mathews
 
Finalist: National Book Award for Fiction
 
Follows a young Indian American woman who is grappling with graduating into a recession, working a grueling entry-level corporate job and trying to date Marina, a beautiful dancer who always seems just beyond her grasp.

by Alejandro Varela
 
Finalist: National Book Award for Fiction
 
Returning to his hometown to care for his ailing father, Andres, a gay Latinx professor, decides to attend his 20-year high school reunion where he encounters the long-lost characters of his youth and must confront these relationships to better understand his own life.
The invisible kingdom : reimagining chronic illness

The invisible kingdom : reimagining chronic illness

by Meghan O'Rourke
 
Finalist: National Book Award for Nonfiction
 
Drawing on her own medical experiences as well as a decade of interviews with doctors, patients, researchers, and public health experts, the author offers a revelatory investigation into the rise of chronic illness and autoimmune diseases that resist easy description or simple cures.
South to America : a journey below the Mason-Dixon to understand the soul of a nation

South to America : a journey below the Mason-Dixon to understand the soul of a nation

by Imani Perry
 
Finalist: National Book Award for Nonfiction
 
This intricately woven tapestry of stories of immigrant communities, exploitative opportunists, enslaved peoples, unsung heroes and lived experiences shows the meaning of American is inextricably linked to the South and understanding its history and culture is the key to understanding our nation as a whole. 
Breathless : the scientific race to defeat a deadly virus

Breathless : the scientific race to defeat a deadly virus

by David Quammen
 
Finalist: National Book Award for Nonfiction
 
The story of the worldwide scientific quest to decipher the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, trace its source and make possible the vaccines to fight the Covid-19 pandemic.

by Ingrid Rojas Contreras
Finalist: National Book Award for Nonfiction
 
Interweaving spellbinding family stories, resurrected Colombian history and her own deeply personal reckonings with the bounds of reality, the author shares her inheritance of the secrets: the power to talk to the dead, tell the future, treat the sick and move the clouds. 
His name is George Floyd : one man's life and the struggle for racial justice

His name is George Floyd : one man's life and the struggle for racial justice

by Robert Samuels
 
Finalist: National Book Award for Nonfiction
 
Two prize-winning Washington Post reporters examine how systemic racism impacted both the life and death of the 46-year old black man who was murdered in broad daylight outside a Minneapolis convenience store by white officer Derek Chauvin.
Look at this blue : a poem

Look at this blue : a poem

by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke
 
Finalist: National Book Award for Poetry
 
Truths about what we have lost and have yet to lose permeate this book-length poem by American Book Award winner and Fulbright scholar Allison Adelle Hedge Coke. An assemblage of historical record and lyric fragments, these poems form a taxonomy of threatened lives-human, plant, and animal-in a century marked by climate emergency. Look at This Blue insists upon a reckoning with and redress of America's continuing violence toward Earth and its peoples, as Hedge Coke's cataloguing of loss crescendos into resistance.
Punks : New & Selected Poems

Punks : New & Selected Poems

by John Keene
 
Finalist: National Book Award for Poetry
 
A landmark collection of poetry by acclaimed fiction writer, translator, and MacArthur Fellow John Keene, PUNKS: NEW & SELECTED POEMS is a generous treasury in seven sections that spans decades and includes previously unpublished and brand new work. With depth and breadth, PUNKS weaves together historic narratives of loss, lust, and love. The many voices that emerge in these poems--from historic Black personalities, both familial and famous, to the poet's friends and lovers in gay bars and bedrooms--form a cast of characters capable of addressing desire, oppression, AIDS, and grief through sorrowful songs that "we sing as hard as we live." At home in countless poetic forms, PUNKS reconfirms John Keene as one of the most important voices in contemporary poetry.
Balladz

Balladz

by Sharon Olds
 
Finalist: National Book Award for Poetry
 
A new poetry collection from Pulitzer and T. S. Eliot Prize winner Sharon Olds. "At the time of have-not, I look at myself in this mirror," writes Olds in this self-scouring, exhilarating volume, which opens with a section of quarantine poems, and at its center boasts what she calls Amherst Balladz (whose syntax honors Emily Dickinson: "she was our Girl - our Woman - / Man enough - for me") and many more in her own contemporary, long-flowing-sentence rhythm, in which she sings of her childhood, young womanhood, and old age all mixed up together, seeing an early lover in the one who is about to buried; seeing her white privilege without apology; seeing her mother, whom readers of Olds will recognize, "flushed and exalted at punishment time"; seeing how we've spoiled the earth but carrying a stray indoor spider carefully back out to the garden. It is Sharon's gift to us that in her richly detailed exposure of her sorrows she can still elegize songbirds, her true kin, and write that heaven comes here in life, not after it.
Best Barbarian : poems

Best Barbarian : poems

by Roger Reeves
 
Finalist: National Book Award for Poetry
 
An incandescent collection that interrogates the personal and political nature of desire, freedom, and disaster. In his brilliant, expansive second volume, Whiting Award-winning poet Roger Reeves probes the apocalypses and raptures of humanity -- climate change, anti-Black racism, familial and erotic love, ecstasy and loss. The poems in Best Barbarian roam across the literary and social landscape, from Beowulf's Grendel to the jazz musician Alice Coltrane, from reckoning with immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border to thinking through the fraught beauty of the moon on a summer night after the police have killed a Black man. Drawing on a history of poetry that ranges from the Aeneid to Walt Whitman to Drake, Best Barbarian offers moments of joy and intimacy amid catastrophe.
The rupture tense : poems

The rupture tense : poems

by Jenny Xie
 
Finalist: National Book Award for Poetry
 
Shaped around moments of puncture and release, The Rupture Tense registers what leaks across the breached borders between past and future, background and foreground, silence and utterance. In polyphonic and formally restless sequences, Jenny Xie cracks open reverberant, vexed experiences of diasporic homecoming, intergenerational memory transfer, state-enforced amnesia, public secrecies, and the psychic fallout of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Across these poems, memory--historical, collective, personal--stains and erodes. Xie voices what remains irreducible in our complex entanglements with familial ties, language, capitalism, and the histories in which we find ourselves lodged.
A New Name : Septology Vi-vii

A New Name : Septology Vi-vii

by Jon Fosse
 
Finalist: National Book Award for Translated Literature
 
Asle is an aging painter and widower who lives alone on the west coast of Norway. His only friends are his neighbor, Åsleik, a traditional fisherman-farmer, and Beyer, a gallerist who lives in the city. There, in Bjørgvin, lives another Asle, also a painter but lonely and consumed by alcohol. Asle and Asle are doppelgängers--two versions of the same person, two versions of the same life. Written in melodious and hypnotic "slow prose," A New Name is the final installment of Jon Fosse's Septology, "a major work of Scandinavian fiction" (Hari Kunzru) and an exquisite metaphysical novel about love, art, God, friendship, and the passage of time.
Kibogo

Kibogo

by Scholastique Mukasonga
 
Finalist: National Book Award for Translated Literature
 
Kibogo's story is reserved for the evening's end, when women sit around a fire drinking honeyed brew, when just a few are able to stave off sleep. With heads nodding, drifting into the mist of a dream, one faithful storyteller will weave the old legends of the hillside, stories which church missionaries have done everything in their power to expunge. Kibogo's tale is at once an origin myth, a celestial marvel, and a source of hope. And for the white priests who spritz holy water on shriveled trees, it's considered forbidden, satanic, a witchdoctor's hoax. Everyone energetically debates Kibogo's twisted story, but deep down secretly wonders: Can Kibogo really summon the rain?
Jawbone

Jawbone

by Mónica Ojeda
 
Finalist: National Book Award for Translated Literature
 
Fernanda and Annelise are so close they are practically sisters: a double image, inseparable. So how does Fernanda end up bound on the floor of a deserted cabin, held hostage by one of her teachers and estranged from Annelise? When Fernanda, Annelise, and their friends from the Delta Bilingual Academy convene after school, Annelise leads them in thrilling but increasingly dangerous rituals to a rhinestoned, Dior-scented, drag-queen god of her own invention. Even more perilous is the secret Annelise and Fernanda share, rooted in a dare in which violence meets love. Meanwhile, their literature teacher Miss Clara, who is obsessed with imitating her dead mother, struggles to preserve her deteriorating sanity. Each day she edges nearer to a total break with reality. Interweaving pop culture references and horror concepts drawn from Herman Melville, H. P. Lovecraft, and anonymous "creepypastas," Jawbone is an ominous, multivocal novel that explores the terror inherent in the pure potentiality of adolescence and the fine line between desire and fear.
Seven empty houses : Stories

Seven empty houses : Stories

by Samanta Schweblin
 
Finalist: National Book Award for Translated Literature
 
Published for the first time in English, an author at the forefront of a new generation of Latin American writers presents seven stories in which seven houses are devoid of love or life or furniture, of people or the truth or of memories, but something always creeps back in.
Scattered all over the earth

Scattered all over the earth

by Yōko Tawada
 
Finalist: National Book Award for Translated Literature
 
Welcome to the not-too-distant future: Japan, having vanished from the face of the earth, is now remembered as "the land of sushi." Hiruko, its former citizen and a climate refugee herself, has a job teaching immigrant children in Denmark with her invented language Panska (Pan-Scandinavian): "homemade language. no country to stay in. three countries I experienced. insufficient space in brain. so made new language. homemade language." As she searches for anyone who can still speak her mother tongue, Hiruko soon makes new friends. Her troupe travels to France, encountering an umami cooking competition; a dead whale; an ultra-nationalist named Breivik; unrequited love; Kakuzo robots; red herrings; uranium; an Andalusian matador. Episodic and mesmerizing scenes flash vividly along, and soon they're all next off to Stockholm. With its intrepid band of companions, Scattered All Over the Earth (the first novel of a trilogy) may bring to mind Alice's Adventures in Wonderland or a surreal Wind in the Willows, but really is just another sui generis Yoko Tawada masterwork.
The ogress and the orphans

The ogress and the orphans

by Kelly Regan Barnhill
 
Finalist: National Book Award for Young People's Literature
 
In Stone-in-the-Glen, which has fallen on hard times, the Orphans of Orphan House, when a child goes missing and their Ogress is accused, must prove her innocence to the town and expose the real villain in their midst. 
The lesbiana's guide to Catholic school

The lesbiana's guide to Catholic school

by Sonora Reyes
 
Finalist: National Book Award for Young People's Literature
 
Transferred to a Catholic school, 16-year-old Yami Flores finds it hard to fake being straight when she falls for Bo, the only openly queer girl at school, but refuses to follow her heart until she learns to live her full truth out loud. 
Victory. Stand! : raising my fist for justice

Victory. Stand! : raising my fist for justice

by Tommie Smith
 
Finalist: National Book Award for Young People's Literature
 
A groundbreaking and timely graphic memoir from one of the most iconic figures in American sports-and a tribute to his fight for civil rights. On October 16, 1968, during the medal ceremony at the Mexico City Olympics, Tommie Smith, the gold medal winner in the 200-meter sprint, and John Carlos, the bronze medal winner, stood on the podium in black socks and raised their black-gloved fists to protest racial injustice inflicted upon African Americans. Both men were forced to leave the Olympics, received death threats, and faced ostracism and continuing economic hardships. In his first-ever memoir for young readers, Tommie Smith looks back on his childhood growing up in rural Texas through to his stellar athletic career, culminating in his historic victory and Olympic podium protest. Cowritten with Newbery Honor and Coretta Scott King Author Honor recipient Derrick Barnes and illustrated with bold and muscular artwork from Emmy Award-winning illustrator Dawud Anyabwile, Victory. Stand! paints a stirring portrait of an iconic moment in Olympic history that still resonates today.
All my rage

All my rage

by Sabaa Tahir
 
Finalist: National Book Award for Young People's Literature
 
When his attempts to save his familys motel spiral out of control, Salahudin and his best friend Noor, two outcasts in their town, must decide what their friendship is worth and how they can defeat the monsters of their past and in their midst. 
Maizy Chen's last chance

Maizy Chen's last chance

by Lisa Yee
 
Finalist: National Book Award for Young People's Literature
 
In Last Chance, Minnesota, with her family, Maizy spends her time at the Golden Palace, the restaurant that's been in her family for generations, where she makes some discoveries requiring her to go on a search for answers.