National Book Award Finalists 2021
Fiction
Cloud cuckoo land : a novel
by Anthony Doerr

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

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

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. 60,000 first printing.
The Prophets
by Robert Jones

Two enslaved young men on a Deep South plantation find refuge in each other while transforming a quiet shed into a haven for their fellow slaves, before an enslaved preacher declares their bond sinful.
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

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.
Non-Fiction
A little devil in America : notes in praise of black performance
by Hanif Abdurraqib

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

Offering a uniquely personal account of aquifer depletion and the deeper layers through which it gains meaning and force, an anthropologist journeys back to western Kansas, where five generations of his family lived as irrigation farmers and ranchers, to try to make sense of this vital resource and its loss. Illustrations.
Tastes like war : a memoir
by Grace M. Cho

"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

"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"
All that she carried : the journey of Ashley's sack, a black family keepsake
by Tiya Miles

The story of how three generations of Black women have passed down a family treasure—a sack filled with a few precious items given from an enslaved woman to her daughter in 1850s South Carolina.