Check Out the National Book Award Finalists for 2019
Updated: Congratulations to the 2019 winners!
Trust Exercise by Susan Choi
The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom
Sight Lines by Arthur Sze
Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming by László Krasznahorkai, translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet
1919: The Year That Changed America by Martin W. Sandler
It's October, and everyone knows what that means... time for the National Book Awards! This morning, the National Book Foundation announced this year's finalists in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translated literature, and young people's literature.
Explore the list of finalists below, and check out the titles from The New York Public Library. And take a look at last year's finalists and winners, too.
Fiction
Trust Exercise by Susan Choi
Falling in love while attending a competitive 1980s performing arts high school, David and Sarah rise through the ranks before the realities of their family dynamics and economic statuses trigger a spiral that impacts their adult lives.Sabrina & Corina: Stories by Kali Fajardo-Anstine
Against the remarkable backdrop of Denver, Colorado, Fajardo-Anstine's Latina characters of indigenous ancestry navigate the land the way they navigate their lives: with caution, grace, and quiet force.Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James
Hired to find a mysterious boy who disappeared three years before, Tracker joins a search party that is quickly targeted deadly creatures.
The Other Americans by Laila Lalami
The suspicious death of a Moroccan immigrant impacts the lives of a diverse cast of characters, including his jazz-composer daughter, an undocumented witness and an Iraqi War veteran. By the award-winning author of The Moor's Account.
Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips
The shattering disappearance of two young girls from Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula compounds the isolation and fears of a tight-woven community, connecting the lives of neighbors, witnesses, family members and a detective throughout an ensuing year of tension.
Nonfiction
The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom
Describes the author’s upbringing in a New Orleans East shotgun house as the unruly 13th child of a widowed mother, tracing a century of family history and the impact of class, race and Hurricane Katrina on her sense of identity.
Thick: And Other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom
In these eight piercing explorations on beauty, media, money, and more, Tressie McMillan Cottom—award-winning professor and acclaimed author of Lower Ed—embraces her venerated role as a purveyor of wit, wisdom, and Black Twitter snark about all that is right and much that is wrong with this thing we call society.What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance by Carolyn Forché
The prize-winning author of Blue Hour describes her deep friendship with a mysterious intellectual who introduced her to the culture and people of El Salvador, inspiring her work as an unlikely activist.
The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present by David Treuer
An anthropologist's chronicle of Native American life from the Wounded Knee massacre to the present traces the unprecedented resourcefulness and reinvention of distinct tribe cultures that assimilated into mainstream life to preserve Native identity.
Solitary by Albert Woodfox with Leslie George
Chronicles the author's extraordinary achievements as an activist during and after spending 40 years in solitary confinement for a crime he did not commit, describing how he has committed his post-exoneration life to prison reform.
Poetry
The Tradition by Jericho Brown
Brown’s poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie?
“I”: New and Selected Poems by Toi Derricotte
The acclaimed author of ""The Black Notebooks"" offers a collection of poetry that spans 50 years of life experience.
Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky
At once a love story, an elegy, and an urgent plea, these poems confronts our time's vicious atrocities and our collective silence in the face of them.
Be Recorder by Carmen Giménez Smith
Offers readers a blazing way forward into an as yet unmade world; investigates the precariousness of personhood; and turns the increasingly pressing urge to cry out into a dream of rebellion—against compromise, against inertia, against self-delusion, and against the ways the media dream up our complacency in an America that depends on it.
Sight Lines by Arthur Sze
In his scenes of the quotidian, musings on life and death, and traversals between the natural and the artificial, Sze opens us to multitudinous lines of sight.
Translated Literature
Death Is Hard Work by Khaled Khalifa, translated from the Arabic by Leri Price
The award-winning author of In Praise of Hatred draws on first-person experiences in the story of three siblings who set aside their differences and risk their lives during the Syrian civil war to honor their late father's final wishes.
Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming by László Krasznahorkai, translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet
Returning at the end of his life to his provincial Hungarian hometown, Baron Bela Wenckheim, leaving his many casino debts behind, longs to be reunited with his high-school sweetheart, which sets in motion a chain of events that changes the town and its inhabitants forever.
The Barefoot Woman by Scholastique Mukasonga, translated from the French by Jordan Stump
A moving, unforgettable tribute to a Tutsi woman who did everything to protect her children from the Rwandan genocide, by the daughter who refuses to let her family's story be forgotten.
The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder
An Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance finds a young novelist hiding her editor from mysterious authorities who would erase all memories of people who once existed.
Crossing by Pajtim Statovci, translated from the Finnish by David Hackston
The death of Enver Hoxha and the loss of his father leave Bujar growing up in the ruins of Communist Albania and of his own family.
Young People’s Literature
Pet by Akwaeke Emezi
In a near-future society that claims to have gotten rid of all monstrous people, a creature emerges from a painting seventeen-year-old Jam's mother created, a hunter from another world seeking a real-life monster.
Look Both Ways: A Tale Told in Ten Blocks by Jason Reynolds
A whimsical exploration of the role detours play in life follows a group of students who become so engaged in everyday activities while taking 10 different routes home from school that they fail to notice a school bus that has dropped from the sky.
Patron Saints of Nothing by Randy Ribay
When seventeen-year-old Jay Reguero learns his Filipino cousin and former best friend, Jun, was murdered as part of President Duterte's war on drugs, he flies to the Philippines to learn more.
Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All by Laura RubyWhen Frankie's mother died and her father left her and her siblings at an orphanage in Chicago, it was supposed to be only temporary. That's why she is not prepared for the day that he arrives for his weekend visit with a new woman on his arm and out-of-state train tickets in his pocket.
1919: The Year That Changed America by Martin W. Sandler
1919 was a world-shaking year, when multiple important movements—from women's suffrage to temperance and beyond—reached crucial tipping points.
Book descriptions taken from the Novelist database.
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