This year's National Book Awards were announced on Wednesday, November 17 and they are such a wonderful slate of books! Take a look through the winners, finalists, and longlists in all categories to find your next great, award-winning read.
Fiction
|
|
Hell of a book : or the altogether factual, Wholly Bona Fide story of a big dreams, hard luck, American-Made Mad Kid
by Jason Mott WINNER. A work of fiction goes to the heart of racism, police violence, and the hidden costs exacted upon Black Americans, and America as a whole. |
|
|
Cloud cuckoo land : a novel
by Anthony Doerr FINALIST. Follows four young dreamers and outcasts through time and space, from 1453 Constantinople to the future, as they discover resourcefulness and hope amidst peril in the new novel by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of All the Light We Cannot See. |
|
|
Matrix
by Lauren Groff FINALIST. Cast out of the royal court, 17-year-old Marie de France, born the last in a long line of women warriors, is sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey where she vows to chart a bold new course for the women she now leads and protects. |
|
|
Zorrie : a novel
by Laird Hunt FINALIST. Cast adrift in the Depression-era West after the last of her relatives pass away, Zorrie survives by working at a radium processing plant before finding love, community and unexpected loss upon returning to her small Indiana hometown. |
|
|
The prophets : a novel
by Robert Jones FINALIST. A singular and stunning debut novel about the forbidden union between two enslaved young men on a Deep South plantation, the refuge they find in each other, and a betrayal that threatens their existence. |
|
|
The love songs of W.E.B. Du Bois : a novel
by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers LONGLIST. To come to terms with who she is and what she wants, Ailey, the daughter of an accomplished doctor and a strict schoolteacher, embarks on a journey through her family’s past, helping her embrace her full heritage, which is the story of the Black experience in itself. |
|
|
Abundance : a novel
by Jakob Guanzon LONGLIST. Recently released from prison for dealing opioids and living in a pickup truck, a father and son try to get their lives back on track, but are hindered after a parking lot altercation sends them fleeing into the night. |
|
|
Intimacies
by Katie M. Kitamura LONGLIST. Seeking a fresh start an interpreter takes a position at the International Court at The Hague and is drawn into numerous personal dramas, including her lover’s ongoing entanglement in his marriage and her friend witnessing a random act of violence. |
|
|
The souvenir museum : stories
by Elizabeth McCracken LONGLIST. Award-winning author Elizabeth McCracken is an undisputed virtuoso of the short story, and this new collection features her most vibrant and heartrending work to date. |
|
|
Bewilderment : a novel
by Richard Powers LONGLIST. A widowed astrobiologist and single father to a troubled son contemplates an experimental neurofeedback treatment that trains the boy on the recorded patterns of his mother’s brain in the new novel from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Overstory. |
Nonfiction
|
|
All that she carried : the journey of Ashley's sack, a black family keepsake
by Tiya Miles WINNER. Sitting in the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture is a rough cotton bag, called "Ashley's Sack," embroidered with just a handful of words that evoke a sweeping family story of loss and of love passed down through generations. In 1850s South Carolina, just before nine-year-old Ashley was sold, her mother, Rose, gave her a sack filled with just a few things as a token of her love. Decades later, Ashley's granddaughter, Ruth, embroidered this history on the bag--including Rose's message that "It be filled with my Love always." Historian Tiya Miles carefully follows faint archival traces back to Charleston to find Rose in the kitchen where she may have packed the sack for Ashley. From Rose's last resourceful gift to her daughter, Miles then follows the paths their lives and the lives of so many like them took to write a unique, innovative history of the lived experience of slavery in the United States. The contents of the sack--a tattered dress, handfuls of pecans, a braidof hair, "my Love always"--speak volumes and open up a window on Rose and Ashley's world. As she follows Ashley's journey, Miles metaphorically "unpacks" the sack, deepening its emotional resonance and revealing the meanings and significance of everything it contained. These include the story of enslaved labor's role in the cotton trade and apparel crafts and the rougher cotton "negro cloth" that was left for enslaved people to wear; the role of the pecan in nutrition, survival, and southern culture; the significance of hair to Black women and of locks of hair in the nineteenth century; and an exploration of Black mothers' love and the place of emotion in history. |
|
|
A little devil in America : notes in praise of black performance
by Hanif Abdurraqib FINALIST. A poet, essayist and cultural critic presents a profound and lasting reflection on how black performance is inextricably woven into the fabric of American culture. |
|
|
Running out : in search of water on the High Plains
by Lucas Bessire FINALIST. This book-the first ethnography of water conservation on the Great Plains-provides an account of High Plains aquifer decline through an exploration of the different ways in which heartland residents inhabit and understand the imminent depletion of groundwater. This literary ethnography offers a vividly sketched look into the lives and stories of this community, based on interviews with members of the community such as fellow farmers and state regulators, woven together with historical data, journalistic documentation, and Bessire's personal reflections of his family's lived experiences. |
|
|
Tastes like war : a memoir
by Grace M. Cho FINALIST. Grace M. Cho grew up in a small, rural American town as the daughter of a white American merchant marine and the Korean bar hostess he met abroad. When Grace was fifteen, her Korean mother experienced the onset of schizophrenia, a condition that would continue for the rest of her life. Part food memoir, part sociological investigation, TASTES LIKE WAR is a hybrid text about a daughter's search through intimate and global history to understand herself and the cultural roots of her mother's condition. |
|
|
Covered with night : a story of murder and indigenous justice in early America
by Nicole Eustace FINALIST. An immersive tale of the killing of a Native American man and its far-reaching consequences for Colonial America. In the summer of 1722, on the eve of a conference between the Five Nations of the Iroquois and British-American colonists, two colonial furtraders brutally attacked an Indigenous hunter in colonial Pennsylvania. The crime set the entire mid-Atlantic on edge, with many believing that war was imminent. Frantic efforts to resolve the case created a contest between Native American forms of justice, centered on community, forgiveness, and reparations, and an ideology of harsh reprisal, based on British law, that called for the killers' execution. In a stunning narrative history based on painstaking original research, acclaimed historian Nicole Eustace reconstructs the crime and its aftermath, taking us into the worlds of Euro-Americans and Indigenous peoples in this formative period. A feat of reclamation evoking Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's A Midwife's Tale and Alan Taylor's William Cooper's Town, Eustace's utterly absorbing account provides a new understanding of Indigenous forms of justice, with lessons for our era. |
|
|
The ground breaking : an American city and its search for justice
by Scott Ellsworth LONGLIST. The definitive, newsbreaking account of the ongoing investigation into the Tulsa race massacre In the late spring of 1921, Tulsa, Oklahoma, erupted into the worst single incident of racial violence in American history. Over the course of sixteen hours, mobs of white men and women looted and burned to the ground a prosperous African American community, known today as Black Wall Street. More than one thousand homes and businesses were destroyed, and scores, possibly hundreds, of people lost their lives. Then, for nearly a half century, the story of the massacre was actively suppressed. Official records disappeared, history textbooks ignored the tragedy, and citizens were warned to keep silent. Now nearly one hundred years after that horrible day, historian Scott Ellsworth returns to his hometown to tell the untold story of how America's foremost hidden racial tragedy was finally brought to light, and the unlikely cast of characters that made it happen. Part true-crime saga, part archaeological puzzle, andpart investigative journalism, The Ground Breaking weaves in and out of recent history, the distant past, and the modern day to tell a compelling story of a city-and a nation-struggling to come to terms with the dark corners of its past. |
|
|
The sum of us : what racism costs everyone and how we can prosper together
by Heather C. McGhee LONGLIST. Heather C. McGhee's specialty is the American economy--and the mystery of why it so often fails the American public. As she dug into subject after subject, from the financial crisis to declining wages to collapsing public infrastructure, she found a common problem at the bottom of them all: racism--but not just in the obvious ways that hurt people of color. Racism has costs for white people, too. It's the common denominator in our most vexing public problems, even beyond our economy. It is at the core of the dysfunction of our democracy and even the spiritual and moral crises that grip us. Racism is a toxin in the American body and it weakens us all. But how did this happen? And is there a way out? To find the way, McGhee embarks on a deeply personal journey across the country from Mississippi to Maine, tallying up what we lose when we buy into the zero-sum paradigm--the idea that progress for some of us must come at the expense of others. Along the way, she collects the stories of white people who confide in her about losing their homes, their dreams and their shot at a better job to the toxic mix of American racism and greed. This is the story of how public goods in this country--from parks and pools to functioning schools--have become private luxuries; of how unions collapsed, wages stagnated, and inequality increased; and of how this country, unique among the world's advanced economies, has thwarted universal healthcare. It's why we fail to prevent environmental and public health crises that require collective action. But in unlikely places of worship and work, McGhee also finds proof of what she calls the Solidarity Dividend: gains that come when people come together across race, to the benefit of all involved. |
|
|
The free world : art and thought in the Cold War
by Louis Menand LONGLIST. This highly anticipated follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Metaphysical Club tells the story of American culture in the pivotal years from 1945 to 1970 that shaped our era. |
|
|
How the word is passed : a reckoning with the history of slavery across America
by Clint Smith LONGLIST. A look at how the legacy of slavery is preserved in monuments and landmarks such as Angola, a former plantation–turned–maximum-security prison in Louisiana that houses Black men working the fields for virtually no pay. |
|
|
The Black Civil War soldier : a visual history of conflict and citizenship
by Deborah Willis LONGLIST. Though both the Union and Confederate armies excluded African American men from their initial calls to arms, many of the men who eventually served were black. Simultaneously, photography culture blossomed-marking the Civil War as the first conflict to be extensively documented through photographs. In The Black Civil War Soldier, Deb Willis explores the crucial role of photography in (re)telling and shaping African American narratives of the Civil War, pulling from a dynamic visual archive that has largely gone unacknowledged. |
Poetry
|
|
Floaters : poems
by Martín Espada WINNER. From the winner of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize come masterfully crafted narratives of protest, grief, and love. In this collection, Martín Espada bears witness to confrontation with anti-immigrant bigotry as a tenant lawyer years ago, and now sings the praises of Central American adolescents playing soccer in an internment camp founded on that same bigotry. He knows that times of hate also call for poems of love-even in the voice of a Galápagos tortoise. Whether celebrating the visions of fallen dreamers and poets or condemning the devastation of Hurricane Maria and official negligence in his father's Puerto Rico, Espada invokes ferocious, incandescent spirits. |
|
|
by Desiree C. Bailey FINALIST. What Noise Against the Cane is a lyric quest for belonging and freedom, weaving political resistance, Caribbean folklore, immigration, and the realities of Black life in America. Desiree C. Bailey begins by reworking the epic in an oceanic narrative of bondage and liberation in the midst of the Haitian Revolution. The poems move into the contemporary Black diaspora, probing the mythologies of home, belief, nation, and womanhood. |
|
|
A thousand times you lose your treasure
by Hoa Nguyen FINALIST. A poetic meditation on historical, personal, and cultural pressures pre- and post-“Fall-of-Saigon” with verse biography on the poet’s mother, Diệp Anh Nguyễn, a stunt motorcyclist in an all-women Vietnamese circus troupe. Multilayered, plaintive, and provocative, the poems in A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure are alive with archive and inhabit histories. By turns lyrical and unsettling, Hoa Nguyen’s poetry sings of language and loss; dialogues with time, myth and place; and communes with past and future ghosts. |
|
|
The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void
by Jackie Wang FINALIST. The poems in The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void read like dispatches from the dream world, with Jackie Wang acting as our trusted comrade reporting across time and space. By sharing her personal index of dreams with its scenes of solidarity and resilience, interpersonal conflict and outlaw jouissance, Wang embodies historical trauma and communal memory. Here, the all-too-familiar interplay between crisis and resistance becomes first distorted, then clarified and refreshed. With a light touch and invigorating sense of humor, Wang illustrates the social dimension of dreams and their ability to inform and reshape the dreamer’s waking world with renewed energy and insight. |
|
|
The wild fox of Yemen : poems
by Threa Almontaser LONGLIST. By turns aggressively reckless and fiercely protective, always guided by faith and ancestry, Threa Almontaser's incendiary debut asks how mistranslation can be a form of self-knowledge and survival. A love letter to the country and people of Yemen, a portrait of young Muslim womanhood in New York after 9/11, and an extraordinarily composed examination of what it means to carry in the body the echoes of what came before, Almontaser's polyvocal collection sneaks artifacts to and from worlds, repurposing language and adapting to the space between cultures. |
|
|
by Baba Badji LONGLIST. Ghost Letters creates a ghost mother who becomes a presiding presence in Baba Badji’s first collection of poems. His poetry explores what it means to be Senegalese, American, and Black, as well as the bonds of Black people across the Black diaspora. |
|
|
by C. M. Burroughs LONGLIST. Master Suffering pendulates between yield and command; the bodies of this book are supplicant yet seething—they want nothing more than to survive. But how does a woman survive? One’s own healthy body helps, but illness is one of the masters of this book. Faith can be a salve for the inscrutable ailments of the body, but God is unreliable in these poems. The female bodies of Master Suffering want power; they want to control and to correct the suffering they witness and withstand. |
|
|
by Andrés Cerpa LONGLIST. The Vault is a quiet and vulnerable sequence of ethereal fragments, letters, and poems that trace a narrative of love and healing in the afterlife of a parent's death. Seasons turn and a life is built despite the ruin. Each poem is a music box of prayer, of the decisions made and yet to be made. In these soul-searching poems, we see a speaker whittled down to the core of fear, attempting to love. |
|
|
Twice alive : an ecology of intimacies
by Forrest Gander LONGLIST. In the searing ecological and love poems of his new collection, Twice Alive, Pulitzer Prize winner Forrest Gander addresses the exigencies of our historical moment and the intimacies, personal and environmental, that bind us to others and to the world. Drawing from his training in geology and on the tradition of Sangam literature, Gander invests these poems with an emotional intensity that illumines our deep-tangled interrelations. While conducting fieldwork with a celebrated mycologist, Gander links human intimacy with the transformative collaborations between species that compose lichens. His poems ask us provocative questions: Do we live twice? Can we really merge with others? Twice Alive combines what one critic (Alan Golding) calls "the most searing love poems of the 21st century" with poems centered on the environment. Gander addresses personal and ecological trauma- several poems focus on the devastation wrought by wildfires in California where he lives-but his tone is overwhelmingly celebratory. Twice Alive is a book charged with exultation and tenderness. |
Translated Literature
|
|
Winter in Sokcho
by Élisa Shua Dusapin, Aneesa Abbas Higgins WINNER. It's winter in Sokcho, a tourist town on the border between South and North Korea. The cold slows everything down. Bodies are red and raw, the fish turn venomous, beyond the beach guns point out from the North's watchtowers. A young French Korean woman works as a receptionist in a tired guesthouse. One evening, an unexpected guest arrives: a French cartoonist determined to find inspiration in this desolate landscape. The two form an uneasy relationship. When she agrees to accompany him on trips to discover an "authentic" Korea, they visit snowy mountaintops and dramatic waterfalls, and cross into North Korea. But he takes no interest in the Sokcho she knows-the gaudy neon lights, the scars of war, the fish market where her mother works. As she's pulled into his vision and taken in by his drawings, she strikes upon a way to finally be seen/ |
|
|
Peach blossom paradise
by Fei Ge, Canaan Morse FINALIST. Consumed by thoughts of revolution in 1898 China, Xiumi begins fighting the Confucian social mores that view women as property and, on her wedding day, becomes a pawn in a series of violent transactions carried out by men who think they are building paradise. |
|
|
The twilight zone : a novel
by Nona Fernández, Natasha Wimmer FINALIST. A writer and documentarian follows the life of a secret police officer who admitted to torturing people during the Pinochet dictatorship in 1984 Chile in a new novel from the author of Space Invaders. |
|
|
When we cease to understand the world
by Benjamín Labatut, Adrian Nathan West FINALIST. A fictional examination of the lives of real-life scientists and thinkers whose discoveries resulted in moral consequences beyond their imagining. When We Cease to Understand the World is a book about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction. Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrodinger: these are some of luminaries into whose troubled lives Labatut's book thrusts the reader, showing us how they grappled with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled genius, alienate friends and lovers, descend into isolation and insanity. Some of their discoveries reshape human life to the better; others pave the way to chaos and unimaginable suffering. The lines are never clear. At a breakneck pace and with a wealth of disturbing detail, Benjamin Labatut uses the imaginative resources of fiction to tell the stories of scientists and mathematicians who expanded our notions of the possible. |
|
|
Planet of Clay
by Samar Yazbek, Leri Price FINALIST. Rima, a young girl from Damascus, longs to walk, to be free to follow the will of her feet, but instead is perpetually constrained. She finds refuge in a fantasy world full of colored crayons, secret planets, and The Little Prince, reciting passages of the Qur’an like a mantra as everything and everyone around her is blown to bits. Since Rima hardly ever speaks, people think she’s crazy, but she is no fool—the madness is in the battered city around her. One day while taking a bus through Damascus, a soldier opens fire and her mother is killed. Rima, wounded, is taken to a military hospital before her brother leads her to the besieged area of Ghouta—where, between bombings, she writes her story. In Planet of Clay, Samar Yazbek offers a surreal depiction of the horrors taking place in Syria, in vivid and poetic language and with a sharp eye for detail and beauty. |
|
|
Waiting for the waters to rise
by Maryse Condé, Richard Philcox LONGLIST. Babakar is an African doctor living alone until the child Anaïs comes into his life. Forced to abandon his solitude, he takes her to Haiti in search of her family. |
|
|
by Bo-young Kim LONGLIST. Straddling science fiction, fantasy and myth, the writings of award-winning author Bo-Young Kim have garnered a cult following in South Korea, where she is widely acknowledged as a pioneer and inspiration. On the Origin of Species makes available for the first time in English some of Kim’s most acclaimed stories, as well as an essay on science fiction. Her strikingly original, thought-provoking work teems with human and non-human beings, all of whom are striving to survive through evolution, whether biologically, technologically or socially. Kim’s literature of ideas offers some of the most rigorous and surprisingly poignant reflections on post-human existence being written today. |
|
|
Rabbit island : stories
by Elvira Navarro, Christina MacSweeney LONGLIST. Combining the gritty surrealism of David Lynch with the explosive interior meditations of Clarice Lispector, this collection of 11 stories locates madness and liberation in smoke-filled hotels, mutating cities and recurring dreams. |
|
|
An Inventory of Losses
by Judith Schalansky, Jackie Smith LONGLIST. Each disparate object described in this book—a Caspar David Friedrich painting, a species of tiger, a villa in Rome, a Greek love poem, an island in the Pacific—shares a common fate: it no longer exists, except as the dead end of a paper trail. Recalling the works of W. G. Sebald, Bruce Chatwin, and Rebecca Solnit, An Inventory of Losses is a beautiful evocation of twelve specific treasures that have been lost to the world forever, and that, taken as a whole, open mesmerizing new vistas of how to think about extinction and loss. With meticulous research and a vivid awareness of why we should care about these losses, Judith Schalansky, the acclaimed author of Atlas of Remote Islands, lets these objects speak for themselves: she ventriloquizes the tone of other sources, burrows into the language of contemporaneous accounts, and deeply interrogates the very notion of memory. |
|
|
In memory of memory : a romance
by Mariia Stepanova, Sasha Dugdale LONGLIST. With the death of her aunt, the narrator is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of an entire century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of an ordinary family that somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century. The family's pursuit of a quiet, civilized, ordinary life-during such atrocious times-is itself a strange odyssey. In dialogue with thinkers like Roland Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, and Osip Mandelstam, In Memory of Memory is imbued with rare intellectual curiosity and a wonderfully soft-spoken, poetic voice. Dipping into various genres-essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue, and history-Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers a bold exploration of cultural and personal memory. |
Young People's Literature
|
|
Last night at the Telegraph Club
by Malinda Lo WINNER. When Lily realizes she has feelings for a girl in her math class, it threatens Lily's oldest friendships and even her father's citizenship status and eventually, Lily must decide if owning her truth is worth everything she has ever known. |
|
|
The legend of auntie Po
by Shing Yin Khor FINALIST. Aware of the racial tumult in the years after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, Mei tries to remain blissfully focused on her job, her close friendship with the camp foreman's daughter, and telling stories about Paul Bunyan--reinvented as Po PanYin (Auntie Po), an elderly Chinese matriarch. |
|
|
Too Bright to See
by Kyle Lukoff FINALIST. It's the summer before middle school and eleven-year-old Bug's best friend Moira has decided the two of them need to use the next few months to prepare. For Moira, this means figuring out the right clothes to wear, learning how to put on makeup, and deciding which boys are cuter in their yearbook photos than in real life. But none of this is all that appealing to Bug, who doesn't particularly want to spend more time trying to understand how to be a girl. Besides, there's something more important to worry about: a ghost is haunting Bug's eerie old house in rural Vermont...and maybe haunting Bug in particular. As Bug begins to untangle the mystery of who this ghost is and what they're trying to say, an altogether different truth comes to light--Bug is transgender. |
|
|
Revolution in Our Time : The Black Panther Party’s Promise to the People
by Kekla Magoon FINALIST. In this comprehensive, inspiring, and all-too-relevant history of the Black Panther Party, Kekla Magoon introduces readers to the Panthers’ community activism, grounded in the concept of self-defense, which taught Black Americans how to protect and support themselves in a country that treated them like second-class citizens. For too long the Panthers’ story has been a footnote to the civil rights movement rather than what it was: a revolutionary socialist movement that drew thousands of members—mostly women—and became the target of one of the most sustained repression efforts ever made by the U.S. government against its own citizens. |
|
|
Me (Moth)
by Amber McBride FINALIST. Moth, who lost her family in an accident, and Sani, who is battling ongoing depression, take a road trip that has them chasing ghosts and searching for ancestors, which helps them move forward in surprising, powerful and unforgettable ways. |
|
|
Unspeakable : the Tulsa Race Massacre
by Carole Boston Weatherford LONGLIST. Celebrated author Carole Boston Weatherford and illustrator Floyd Cooper provide a powerful look at the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, one of the worst incidents of racial violence in our nation's history. |
|
|
Home is not a country
by Safia Elhillo LONGLIST. A novel in verse follows the experiences of a misfit teen in a discriminatory suburban community who questions her mixed heritage before unexpected family revelations force her to fight for her own identity. By the award-winning author of The January Children. |
|
|
A Snake Falls to Earth
by Darcie Little Badger LONGLIST. Nina is a Lipan girl in our world. She’s always felt there was something more out there. She still believes in the old stories. Oli is a cottonmouth kid, from the land of spirits and monsters. Like all cottonmouths, he’s been cast from home. He’s found a new one on the banks of the bottomless lake. Nina and Oli have no idea the other exists. But a catastrophic event on Earth, and a strange sickness that befalls Oli’s best friend, will drive their worlds together in ways they haven’t been in centuries. And there are some who will kill to keep them apart. |
|
|
The mirror season
by Anna-Marie McLemore LONGLIST. After Ciela and Lock are sexually assaulted at the same party, they develop a cautious friendship through her family's possibly-magical pastelería and his secret forest of otherworldly trees. |
|
|
From a whisper to a rallying cry : the killing of Vincent Chin and the trial that galvanized the Asian American movement
by Paula Yoo LONGLIST. An account of the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin shares insights into how a miscarriage of justice in the wake of a hate crime rallied the Asian-American community throughout a groundbreaking civil rights trial. By the award-winning author of Sixteen Years in Sixteen Seconds. |