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Longlists, Shortlists, Finalists, and Winners! The Book Prize Lists Are Out!
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National Book Awards Longlist for Fiction
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When we were sisters : a novel
by Fatimah Asghar
After the death of their parents, three Muslim American sisters are left to raise one another, and as the youngest, Kausar, grows up, she must choose whether to remain in the life of love, sorrow and codependency shes known or carve out a new path for herself.
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Shutter
by Ramona Emerson
A forensic photographer working for the Albuquerque police force, Rita Todacheene, who sees the ghosts of crime victims who point her toward the clues the other investigators overlook, is caught in the crosshairs of one of Albuquerques most dangerous cartels when a furious ghost sets her on a path of vengeance.
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If I survive you
by Jonathan Escoffery
Fleeing to Miami after political violence consumes their native Kingston, a younger son of a Jamaican family, Trelawny, struggles to carve out a place for himself amid financial disaster, racism and flat-out bad luck, clawing himself out of homelessness with a series of odd, often hilarious jobs. 100,000 first printing.
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The rabbit hutch : a novel
by Tess Gunty
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. Illustrations.
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The birdcatcher
by Gayl Jones
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.
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The haunting of Hajji Hotak : and other stories
by Jamil Jan Kochai
The Pen/Hemingway finalist breathes life into his contemporary Afghan characters as he explores heritage, the ghosts of war and homethe one that speaks to the immediate political landscape we reckon with today.
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All this could be different
by Sarah Thankam Mathews
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.
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Nobody Gets Out Alive : Stories
by Leigh Newman
Set in the authors home state of Alaska, this brilliant collection centers around women struggling to survive not just grizzly bears and charging moose but the raw, exhausting legacy of their marriages and families. 50,000 first printing.
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Maria, Maria : and other stories
by Marytza K. Rubio
"For fans of Kali Fajardo-Anstine and Lesley Nneka Arimah, a darkly funny and imaginative debut conjuring tales of Mexican American mystics and misfits. "The first witch of the waters was born in Destruction. The moon named her Maria." From former PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow Marytza K. Rubio comes Maria, Maria, an inimitable collection set across the tropics and megacities of the Americas. Readers will be enticed and infuriated as characters negotiate with nature to cast their desired ends-such asthe enigmatic community college professor in "Brujeria for Beginners'; the disturbingly faithful widow in "Tijuca"; and the lonely little girl in "Burial," who awakens a sabretooth tiger. Brimming with sharp wit and ferocious female intuition, the book bubbles over into a novella of fantastical proportions-a "tropigoth" family drama set in a reimagined California micro-rainforest about the legacies of three Marias, possibly all Marias. Writing in prose so lush it threatens to creep off the page, Rubio emerges as a bold voice new voice in contemporary short fiction"
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The town of Babylon : a novel
by Alejandro Varela
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.
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National Book Awards Longlist for Non-Fiction
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Bright unbearable reality : essays
by Anna Badkhen
"Original collection of essays by Anna Badkhen. Anna Badkhen is a writer. Her awards include the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Barry Lopez Visiting Writer in Ethics and Community Fellowship, and the Joel R. Seldin Award from Psychologists for Social Responsibility for writing about civilians in war zones. She has published six books of nonfiction, and her essays, dispatches, and short stories appear in periodicals and literary magazines such as the New York Review of Books, Granta, The Common, Scalawag, Guernica, the Paris Review, and the New York Times. Badkhen is a contributing editor to the Mānoa Journal"
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Ted Kennedy : a life
by John A. Farrell
Drawing on new sources, including segments of Kennedys personal diary and his private confessions to members of his family, an award-winning biographer, who covered this fourth son of the Kennedy clan closely for years, reveals his famously epic and turbulent life of almost unimaginable tragedy and triumph. Illustrations.
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Uncommon measure : a journey through music, performance, and the science of time
by Natalie Hodges
"How does time shape consciousness, and consciousness, time? Do we live in time, or does time live in us? And how does music, with its patterns of rhythm and harmony, inform our experience of time? Uncommon Measure: Reflections on Music, Performance, andthe Science of Time explores these questions from the perspective of a young Korean American who dedicated herself to perfecting her art until, crippled by performance anxiety, she was forced to give up her dreams of becoming a career solo violinist. Anchoring her narrative in illuminating research in neuroscience and theories of quantum physics, Hodges traces her own passage through model-minority expectations and examines her immigrant mother's encounters with racism to come to terms with the meaning of a life in music. The lessons she learns enable her to move from anxiety toward acceptance, from rote re-creation toward the freedom of improvisation"
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Bad Mexicans : race, empire, and revolution in the borderlands
by Kelly Lytle Hernández
The story of the magonistas, a motley crew of journalists, miners, migrant and other rebels from the United States who helped spark the 1910 Mexican Revolution by organizing thousands of Mexican workers to their cause. Illustrations.
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South to America : a journey below the Mason-Dixon to understand the soul of a nation
by Imani Perry
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 Southand understanding its history and culture is the key to understanding our nation as a whole. 150,000 first printing. Illustrations.
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The man who could move clouds : a memoir
by Ingrid Rojas Contreras
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 secretsthe power to talk to the dead, tell the future, treat the sick and move the clouds. Illustrations.
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Lost & found : a memoir
by Kathryn Schulz
A staff writer at The New Yorker and winner of the Pulitzer Prize brilliantly explores of the role that loss and discovering play in all of our lives, in this part memoir, part guidebook to living in a world that always demands both our gratitude and our grief.
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Trust
by Hernán Díaz
Told from the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction, this unrivaled novel about money, power, intimacy and perception is centered around the mystery of how the Rask family acquired their immense fortune in 1920s-1930s New York City.
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The colony
by Audrey Magee
In 1979, as violence erupts all over Ireland, two outsiders travel to a small island off the west coast in search of their own answers, despite what it may cost the islanders.
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Glory
by Noviolet Bulawayo
From the award-winning author of the Booker-prize finalist We Need New Names comes a novel that chronicles the fall of an oppressive regime, and the chaotic, kinetic potential for real liberation that rises in its wake
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Treacle Walker
by Alan Garner
NOT PUBLISHED IN THE U.S. YET
Treacle Walker is a stunning fusion of myth and folklore and an exploration of the fluidity of time, vivid storytelling that brilliantly illuminates an introspective young mind trying to make sense of everything around him.
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The trees : a novel
by Percival Everett
After a series of brutal murders in a rural Mississippi town, investigators arrive and discover a large number of similar cases that all have roots in the past
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Booth : a novel
by Karen Joy Fowler
Describes the multiple scandals, family triumphs and disasters that took their toll on the 10 children of celebrated Shakespearean actor Junius Booth as the North and the South reached a boiling point and the Civil War broke out.
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Small things like these
by Claire Keegan
In a small Irish town in 1985, coal merchant and family man, Bill Furlong, while delivering an order to the local convent, makes a discovery that forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church.
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Case Study
by Graeme Macrae Burnet
NOT PUBLISHED IN THE U.S. YET
London, 1965. 'I have decided to write down everything that happens, because I feel, I suppose, I may be putting myself in danger,' writes an anonymous patient, a young woman investigating her sister's suicide. In the guise of a dynamic and troubled alter-ego named Rebecca Smyth, she makes an appointment with the notorious and roughly charismatic psychotherapist Collins Braithwaite, whom she believes is responsible for her sister's death. But in this world of beguilement and bamboozlement, neither she nor we can be certain of anything.
Case Study is a novel as slippery as it is riveting, as playful as it is sinister, a meditation on truth, sanity, and the instability of identity by one of the most inventive novelists of our time.
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Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies
by Maddie Mortimer
When a sudden diagnosis threatens to derail each of their lives, Lia, her husband Harry and their beloved daughter, Iris, find the past colliding with the present as the world around them begins to transform, centering around the shifting landscape of Lias body. Original. Illustrations.
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Oh William! : a novel
by Elizabeth Strout
The iconic heroine of My Name is Lucy Barton recounts her complicated, compassionate relationship with William, her first husband—and longtime, on-again-off-again friend and confidant—and the lives they eventually built with other people
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Nightcrawling
by Leila Mottley
When a drunken altercation with a stranger turns into a job she desperately needs, Kiara, who supports her brother and an abandoned 9-year-old boy, starts nightcrawling until her name surfaces in an investigation exposing her as a key witness in a massive scandal within the Oakland Police Department.
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After Sappho
by Selby Wynn Schwartz
NOT AVAILABLE IN THE U.S. YET
A Lambda finalist for The Bodies of Others, Schwartz launches her fiction career with a novel sifting together the stories of women intent on living their own lives and forging a queer identity at the turn of the 20th century. Among them: Italian novelist, poet, and essayist Rina Faccio, U.S. painter Romaine Brooks, and the indomitable Virginia Woolf.
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Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
by Shehan Karunatilaka
NOT AVAILABLE IN THE U.S. YET
Colombo, 1989. Maali Almeida, war photographer, gambler and closet queen, has woken up dead in what seems like a celestial visa office. His dismembered body is sinking in the serene Beira lake and he has no idea who killed him. In a country where scores are settled by death squads, suicide bombers and hired goons, the list of suspects is depressingly long, as the ghouls and ghosts with grudges who cluster round can attest. But even in the afterlife, time is running out for Maali. He has seven moons to try and contact the man and woman he loves most and lead them to a hidden cache of photos that will rock Sri Lanka.
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International Booker Prize Shortlist
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Tomb of sand : a novel
by Gītāñjali Śrī
WINNER!
"WINNER OF THE 2022 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE A playful, feminist, and utterly original epic about a family-especially its inimitable octogenarian matriarch-in northern India. An eighty-year-old woman, Ma, slips into a deep depression after the death ofher husband. Despite her family's cajoling, she refuses to get up from bed. Her responsible eldest son, Bade, and dutiful, Reebok-sporting daughter-in-law, Bahu, flit around trying to attend to Ma's every need, while her favorite grandson, the cheerful and gregarious Sid, entertains her with his guitar. But it is only when Sid's younger brother-Serious Son, pathologically incapable of laughing-brings his grandmother a sparkling golden cane covered with butterflies that things begin to change. With a new lease on life thanks to the powers of the cane, Ma gets out of bed and embarks on a series of adventures that baffle even her unconventional feminist daughter, Beti. She ditches her cumbersome saris, develops a close friendship with a hijra, and finally sets off on a fateful journey that will turn the family's understanding of themselves upside down. Elegant, heartbreaking, and funny all at once, Tomb of Sand is a literary masterpiece. Rich with fantastical elements, folklore, and exuberant wordplay, and encompassing such topics as Buddhism, global warming, feminism, Partition, and the gender binary, it marks the none-too-soon American debut of an extraordinary writer. Translated from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell"
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Heaven
by Mieko Kawakami
A 14-year old student who is bullied mercilessly for having a lazy eye develops a friendship with a female classmate who suffers similar treatment from tormentors, in the new novel from the internationally best-selling author of Breasts and Eggs.
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Elena knows
by Claudia Piñeiro
"After Rita is found dead in a church she used to attend, the official investigation into the incident is quickly closed. Her sickly mother is the only person still determined to find the culprit. Chronicling a difficult journey across the suburbs of thecity, an old debt and a revealing conversation, Elena Knows unravels the secrets of its characters and the hidden facets of authoritarianism and hypocrisy in our society"
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A new name
by Jon Fosse
"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 Bj²rgvin, 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"
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The books of Jacob : or, A fantastic journey across seven borders, five languages, and three major religions, not counting the minor sects. Told by the dead, supplemented by the author, drawing from a range of books, and aided by imagination, the which being the greateest natural gift of any person. That the wise might have it for a record, that my compatriots reflect, laypersons gain some understanding, and melancholy souls obtain some slight enjoyment
by Olga Tokarczuk
Set in the mid-18th century, this sweeping novel follows a mysterious, Messianic religious leader as he, traversing the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires, reinvents himself again and again and wreaks havoc on the conventional order, Jewish and Christian alike. Illustrations.
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Cursed Bunny
by Bora Chung
Cursed Bunny is a genre-defying collection of short stories by Korean author Bora Chung.Blurring the lines between magical realism, horror, and science-fiction, Chung uses elements of the fantastic and surreal to address the very real horrors and cruelties of patriarchy and capitalism in modern society.Anton Hur's translation skilfully captures the way Chung's prose effortlessly glides from being terrifying to wryly humorous.
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Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
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Monkey boy : a novel
by Francisco Goldman
Francesco Goldberg, grappling with his heritage, career and growing up Jewish and Guatemalan in America, returns to his childhood home outside Boston where he explores the pressures of living between worlds all his life.
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Palmares
by Gayl Jones
In a world impacted by greed, conquest and colonial desire, Almeyda, a Black slave girl who, after a fugitive slave settlement called Palmares is destroyed, embarks on a life-altering journey across Brazil to find her husband, lost in battle.
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Invisible child : poverty, survival & hope in an American city
by Andrea Elliott
WINNER!
A Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter follows eight years in the life of a young girl in Brooklyn as her family navigates the world of homeless shelters, violence and addiction, as well as her eventual enrollment in a Pennsylvania boarding school.
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Home, land, security : deradicalization and the journey back from extremism
by Carla Power
"Nicola, Christianne, and Marie are mothers who discovered too late that their sons had been radicalized online and had flown from the West to join the tens of thousands of foreign ISIS fighters in Syria. Too often extremists are portrayed as having sprung from the earth as irredeemable killing machines, but these women underscore the deeper truth that no one is born a terrorist, and they have themselves become activists in preventing violent radicalism. Grasping at the Root explores innovative new counter-extremism programs around the world, including in the United States, Europe, Pakistan, and Indonesia. We meet an American judge who has staked his career on finding new ways to handle terror suspects, a Pakistani woman running a game-changing school for former child soldiers, a radicalized Somali American who learns through literature to see beyond his hate-filled beliefs, and a former neo-Nazi who now helps disarm jihadis"
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Pulitzer Prize for Biography
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Chasing me to my grave : an artist's memoir of the Jim Crow South
by Winfred Rembert
WINNER!
The late celebrated artist tells his life story of growing up in the segregated south, joining the civil rights movement and surviving a near-lynching through a series of drawings and paintings. 150,000 first printing. Illustrations.
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Pessoa : a biography
by Richard Zenith
"Like Richard Ellmann's James Joyce, Richard Zenith's Pessoa immortalizes the life of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. Eighty-five years after his wrenching death in a cramped Lisbon apartment, where he left more than 25,000 manuscript sheets in a wooden trunk, Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) remains one of the most enigmatic and underappreciated poets of the twentieth century. Celebrated for writing in dozens of different poetic voices, known as heteronyms, Pessoa has finally found his definitive biographer in renowned translator Richard Zenith. Setting the story of Pessoa's life against the nationalistic currents of early twentieth-century European history, Zenith charts the depths of Pessoa's explosive imagination and literary genius. Muchas José Saramago brought one of Pessoa's heteronyms to life in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, Zenith traces the backstories of virtually all of Pessoa's imagined personalities, demonstrating how they were projections, spin-offs, or metamorphosesof Pessoa himself. Nothing less than a literary masterpiece, Zenith's monumental work confirms the power of Pessoa's words to speak prophetically to the disconnectedness of modern life"
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The doctors Blackwell : how two pioneering sisters brought medicine to women--and women to medicine
by Janice P. Nimura
"The vivid biography of two pioneering sisters who, together, became America's first female doctors and transformed New York's medical establishment by creating a hospital by and for women. Elizabeth Blackwell believed from an early age that she was destined for greatness beyond the scope of "ordinary" womanhood. Though the world recoiled at the notion of a woman studying medicine, her intelligence and intensity won her the acceptance of the all-male medical establishment and in 1849 she became the firstwoman in America to receive a medical degree. But Elizabeth's story is incomplete without her often forgotten sister, Emily, the third woman in America to receive a medical degree. Exploring the sisters' allies, enemies and enduring partnership, Nimura presents a story of both trial and triumph: Together the sisters' founded the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, the first hospital staffed entirely by women. Both sisters were tenacious and visionary; they were also judgmental, uncompromising, and occasionally misogynistic--their convictions as 19th-century women often contradicted their ambitions. From Bristol, England, to the new cities of antebellum America, this work of rich history follows the sister doctors as they transform the nineteenth century medical establishment and, in turn, our contemporary one"
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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"
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Cuba : an American history
by Ada Ferrer
WINNER!
"An epic, sweeping history of Cuba and its complex ties to the United States, from before the arrival of Columbus to the present day, written by one of the world's leading historians of Cuba"
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Until justice be done : America's first civil rights movement, from the revolution to reconstruction
by Kate Masur
"A groundbreaking history of the antebellum movement for equal rights that reshaped the institutions of freedom after the Civil War. The half century before the Civil War was beset with conflict over freedom as well as slavery: what were the arrangementsof free society, especially for African Americans? Beginning in 1803, many free states enacted black codes that discouraged the settlement and restricted the basic rights of free black people. But claiming the equal-rights promises of the Declaration andthe Constitution, a biracial movement arose to fight these racist state laws. Kate Masur's magisterial history delivers this pathbreaking movement in vivid detail. Its advocates battled in state legislatures, Congress, and the courts, and through petitioning, party politics and elections. They visited slave states to challenge local laws that imprisoned free blacks and sold them into slavery. Despite immovable white majorities and unfavorable court decisions, their vision became increasingly mainstream. After the Civil War, their arguments shaped the Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment, the pillars of our second founding"
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The book of form and emptiness
by Ruth Ozeki
WINNER!
When he begins hearing voices one year after his fathers death, 13-year-old Benny Oh, seeking refuge in the library, meets a colorful cast of characters, including his very own Book, a talking thing, who narrates Bennys life and teaches him to listen to the things that truly matter.
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The Bread the Devil Knead
by Lisa Allen-agostini
This rich, raw and urgent debut novel is a domestic noir of sex and survival set in Trinidad's capital.
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The sentence : a novel
by Louise Erdrich
The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author presents an unusual novel in which a small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the stores most annoying customer. 150,000 first printing.
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Sorrow and bliss : a novel
by Meg Mason
Pushing away her devoted husband, a once-successful writer moves back into her bohemian childhood home, where she struggles to come to terms with the mental illness that has overshadowed her life
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The island of missing trees
by Elif Shafak
"A rich, magical new novel on belonging and identity, love and trauma, nature and renewal, from the Booker-shortlisted author of 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World. Two teenagers, a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot, meet at a taverna on the island they both call home. In the taverna, hidden beneath garlands of garlic, chili peppers and creeping honeysuckle, Kostas and Defne grow in their forbidden love for each other. A fig tree stretches through a cavity in the roof, and this tree bears witness to their hushed, happy meetings and eventually, to their silent, surreptitious departures. The tree is there when war breaks out, when the capital is reduced to ashes and rubble, and when the teenagers vanish. Decades later, Kostas returns. He is a botanist looking for native species, but really, he's searching for lost love. Years later a Ficus carica grows in the back garden of a house in London where Ada Kazantzakis lives. This tree is her only connection to an island she has never visited--- her only connection to her family's troubled history and her complex identity as she seeks to untangle years of secrets to find her place in the world. A moving, beautifully written, and delicately constructed story of love, division, transcendence, history, and eco-consciousness, The Island of Missing Trees is Elif Shafak's best work yet"
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Great circle
by Maggie Shipstead
A century after daredevil female aviator Marian Graves’s disappearance in Antarctica, actress Hadley Baxter is cast to play her and immerses herself in the role as their fates — and their dreams — become intertwined.
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National Book Awards Longlist for Translated Literature
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A new name
by Jon Fosse
"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 Bj²rgvin, 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"
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The books of Jacob : or, A fantastic journey across seven borders, five languages, and three major religions, not counting the minor sects. Told by the dead, supplemented by the author, drawing from a range of books, and aided by imagination, the which being the greateest natural gift of any person. That the wise might have it for a record, that my compatriots reflect, laypersons gain some understanding, and melancholy souls obtain some slight enjoyment
by Olga Tokarczuk
Set in the mid-18th century, this sweeping novel follows a mysterious, Messianic religious leader as he, traversing the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires, reinvents himself again and again and wreaks havoc on the conventional order, Jewish and Christian alike. Illustrations.
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Ibn Arabi's Small Death
by Mohammad Hassan Alwan
Ibn Arabi’s Small Death is a sweeping and inventive work of historical fiction that chronicles the life of the great Sufi master and philosopher Ibn Arabi. Known in the West as “Rumi’s teacher,” he was a poet and mystic who proclaimed that love was his religion. Born in twelfth-century Spain during the Golden Age of Islam, Ibn Arabi traveled thousands of miles from Andalusia to distant Azerbaijan, passing through Morocco, Egypt, the Hijaz, Syria, Iraq, and Turkey on a journey of discovery both physical and spiritual. Witness to the wonders and cruelties of his age, exposed to the political rule of four empires, Ibn Arabi wrote masterworks on mysticism that profoundly influenced the world. Alwan’s fictionalized first-person narrative, written from the perspective of Ibn Arabi himself, breathes vivid life into a celebrated and polarizing figure.
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Seasons of purgatory
by Shahriyār Mandanī§pūr
In Seasons of Purgatory , the fantastical and the visceral merge in tales of tender desire and collective violence, the boredom and brutality of war, and the clash of modern urban life and rural traditions. Mandanipour, banned from publication in his native Iran, vividly renders the individual consciousness in extremis from a variety of perspectives: young and old, man and woman, conscript and prisoner. While delivering a ferocious social critique, these stories are steeped in the poetry and stark beauty of an ancient land and culture.
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Kibogo
by Scholastique Mukasonga
In four beautifully woven parts, Mukasonga spins a marvelous recounting of the clash between ancient Rwandan beliefs and the missionaries determined to replace them with European Christianity.
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Jawbone
by Mónica Ojeda
"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"
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Seven empty houses / : Stories
by Samanta Schweblin
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.
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The employees : a workplace novel of the 22nd century
by Olga Ravn
"Funny and doom-drenched, The Employees chronicles the fate of the Six-Thousand Ship. The human and humanoid crew members complain about their daily tasks in a series of staff reports and memos. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from theplanet New Discovery, the crew becomes strangely and deeply attached to them, even as tensions boil toward mutiny, especially among the humanoids. Olga Ravn's prose is chilling, crackling, exhilarating, and foreboding. The Employees probes into what makes us human, while delivering a hilariously stinging critique of life governed by the logic of productivity"
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Where you come from
by Saésa Staniésić
"In August, 1992, a boy and his mother flee the war in Yugoslavia and arrive in Germany. Six months later, the boy's father joins them, bringing a brown suitcase, insomnia, and a scar on his thigh. Saésa Staniésić's Where You Come From is a novel about this family, whose world is uprooted and remade by war: their history, their life before the conflict, and the years that followed their escape as they created a new life in a new country. Blending autofiction, fable, and choose-your-own-adventure, Where You Come From is set in a village where only thirteen people remain, in lost and made-up memories, in coincidences, in choices, and in a dragons' den. Translated by Damion Searls, it's a novel about homelands, both remembered and imagined, lost and found.A book that playfully twists form and genre with wit and heart to explore questions that lie inside all of us: about language and shame, about arrival and making it just in time, about luck and death, about what role our origins and memories play in our lives"
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Scattered all over the earth
by Yōko Tawada
"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"
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Dublin Literary Award Shortlist
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The death of Vivek Oji
by Akwaeke Emezi
In the wake of a southeastern Nigerian mother's discovery of her son's body on her doorstep, a family struggles to understand the enigmatic nature of a youth shaped by disorienting blackouts, diverse friendships and a cousin's worldly influence.
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Noopiming : the cure for white ladies
by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
"In fierce prose and poetic fragments, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's Noopiming braids together humor, piercing detail, and a deep, abiding commitment to Anishinaabe life to tell stories of resistance, love, and joy"
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At night all blood is black
by David Diop
Haunted for refusing to kill an injured comrade who begged to be spared an agonizing death, a World War I Chocolat soldier from Senegal begins killing enemy soldiers as penance, earning a sinister reputation along the way. 25,000 first printing.
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The art of falling : a novel
by Danielle McLaughlin
A woman finds her precarious marriage and career thrown into turmoil by a reckoning with an old friend and an enigmatic woman’s claim that she is the true creator of a famous work of art. A first novel.
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Remote sympathy
by Catherine Chidgey
The wife of an SS officer, Frau Hahn is oblivious to the fact that a concentration camp is on the fringe of their idyllic life until she is forced into an unlikely and poignant alliance with one of Buchwald's prisoners who challenges her naïve ignorance
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The art of losing
by Alice Zeniter
The Algerian-French daughter of a man who claims he does not remember the past discovers her heritage when her grandmothers return to their native home reveals their familys secret past and the inescapable legacies of colonialism. 15,000 first printing.
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Kirkus Prize for Fiction Finalists
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Trust
by Hernán Díaz
Told from the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction, this unrivaled novel about money, power, intimacy and perception is centered around the mystery of how the Rask family acquired their immense fortune in 1920s-1930s New York City.
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The books of Jacob : or, A fantastic journey across seven borders, five languages, and three major religions, not counting the minor sects. Told by the dead, supplemented by the author, drawing from a range of books, and aided by imagination, the which being the greateest natural gift of any person. That the wise might have it for a record, that my compatriots reflect, laypersons gain some understanding, and melancholy souls obtain some slight enjoyment
by Olga Tokarczuk
Set in the mid-18th century, this sweeping novel follows a mysterious, Messianic religious leader as he, traversing the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires, reinvents himself again and again and wreaks havoc on the conventional order, Jewish and Christian alike. Illustrations.
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Mecca
by Susan Straight
When a past action 20 years ago sparks a slow-burning chain of events in the present, California Highway Patrol officer Johnny Frias is united with a colorful and complicated cast of characters he never saw coming. 50,000 first printing.
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Scattered all over the earth
by Yōko Tawada
"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"
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Scary monsters : a novel in two parts
by Michelle De Kretser
Told in two parts, each by a South Asian migrant to Australia, this novel explores racism, misogyny and ageismthree scary monstersand its reversible format enacts the disorientation that migrants experience when changing countries changes the stories of their lives. Original.
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God's children are little broken things : stories
by Arinze Ifeakandu
"A story collection, set in Nigeria, united by the theme of queer male intimacy. The stakes of loving within a society in flux are explored through the eyes of lovers and their families; from childhood through adulthood; on university campuses and in hospitals, central cities, neighborhoods on the outskirts. Deeply intimate portraits of love in danger come together in a compassionate, finely wrought examination of contemporary Nigeria"
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Kirkus Prize for Non-Fiction Finalists
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By Hands Now Known : Jim Crow's Legal Executioners
by Margaret A. Burnham
The director of Northeastern Universitys Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project examines the legal apparatus that helped sustain Jim Crow-era violence, focusing on a series of harrowing cases from 1920 to 1960. Illustrations.
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The facemaker : a visionary surgeon's battle to mend the disfigured soldiers of World War I
by Lindsey Fitzharris
This real-life wartime medical thriller, showing what courage and imagination can accomplish in the presence of horror, follows pioneering plastic surgeon Dr. Harold Gillies, who after the First World War, dedicated himself to restoring the broken and burned faces of the injured soldiers under his care. 75,000 first printing. Illustrations.
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The 1619 Project : a new origin story
by Nikole Hannah-Jones
This ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began on the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery reimagines if our national narrative actually started in late August of 1619, when a ship arrived in Jamestown bearing a cargo of 20-30 enslaved people from Africa.
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These precious days : essays
by Ann Patchett
Turning her writer’s eye on her own experiences, the brilliant author transforms the private into the universal, providing us all a way to look at our own worlds anew, and reminds how fleeting and enigmatic life can be. 150,000 first printing.
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In sensorium : notes for my people
by Tanaïs
A writer and performer presents a memoir focused on the history of perfumes and how they have been used to mark the differences between the civilized and the barbaric and the pure and polluted
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