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Book Award Spotlight 2020 National Book Award Finalists
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Leave the world behind : a novel
by Rumaan Alam
Sheltering in a New York beach house with a couple that has taken refuge during a massive blackout, a family struggles for information about the power failure while wondering if the cut-off property is actually safe.
Available in print and on Overdrive
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A children's bible : a novel
by Lydia Millet
Contemptuous of the equally neglectful and suffocating parents who would pass the summer in a stupor of drugs and sex, one dozen eerily mature children run away as a dangerous storm descends and subjects them to apocalyptic chaos.
Available on Overdrive
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The secret lives of church ladies
by Deesha Philyaw
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies explores the raw and tender places where black women and girls dare to follow their desires and pursue a momentary reprieve from being good. The nine stories in this collection feature four generations of characters grappling with who they want to be in the world, caught as they are between the church's double standards and their own needs and passions.
Available on Overdrive
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Shuggie Bain : a novel
by Douglas Stuart
A young boy growing up in a rundown 1980s Glasgow public housing facility pursues some semblance of a normal life as his older siblings move on and his mother increasingly succumbs to alcoholism. A first novel.
Available in print and on Overdrive
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Interior Chinatown
by Charles Yu
Willis Wu doesn't perceive himself as a protagonist even in his own life: He's merely Generic Asian man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but he is always relegated to a prop. Yet every day he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He's a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy--the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. At least that's what he has been told, time and time again. Except by one person, his mother. Who says to him: Be more.
Available on Overdrive
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The undocumented Americans : A Homecoming
by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
An Ivy League-educated DACA beneficiary reveals the hidden lives of her fellow undocumented Americans, from the volunteers recruited for the 9/11 Ground Zero cleanup to the homeopathy botanicas of Miami that provide limited health care to non-citizens.
Available on Overdrive
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The dead are arising : the life of Malcolm X
by Les Payne
A revisionary portrait of the iconic civil rights leader draws on hundreds of hours of interviews with surviving family members, intelligence officers and political leaders to offer new insights into Malcolm X’s Depression-era youth, religious conversion and 1965 assassination.
Available in print
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My autobiography of Carson McCullers
by Jenn Shapland
A Pushcart Prize-winning writer draws on an intimate correspondence between McCullers and a woman named Annemarie to share previously unknown insights into the 20th-century novelist’s private life, her approaches to queer fiction and the influence of her time at Yaddo.
Available in print .
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How to Make a Slave and Other Essays
by Jerald Walker
For the black community, Jerald Walker asserts in How to Make a Slave, “anger is often a prelude to a joke, as there is broad understanding that the triumph over this destructive emotion lay in finding its punchline.” It is on the knife’s edge between fury and farce that the essays in this exquisite collection balance. Whether confronting the medical profession’s racial biases, considering the complicated legacy of Michael Jackson, paying homage to his writing mentor James Alan McPherson, or attempting to break free of personal and societal stereotypes, Walker elegantly blends personal revelation and cultural critique. The result is a bracing and often humorous examination by one of America’s most acclaimed essayists of what it is to grow, parent, write, and exist as a black American male. Walker refuses to lull his readers; instead his missives urge them to do better as they consider, through his eyes, how to be a good citizen, how to be a good father, how to live, and how to love.
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Visit https://www.nationalbook.org/2020-national-book-awards-finalists-announced/ to see finalists in the categories of Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People's Literature.
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