2025 National Book Awards - Fiction and NonfictionLike this list

22 items

• 2025 National Book Awards Longlist for Fiction - National Book Foundation

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  "The 2025 Fiction Longlist features two debut novels and one story collection among the ten titles. "

• True True Story of Raja the Gullible and His Mother

  Alameddine, Rabih

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  WINNER. "In a tiny Beirut apartment, 63-year-old Raja and his mother live side by side. A beloved high school philosophy teacher and “the neighborhood homosexual,” Raja relishes books, meditative walks, order, and solitude. Zalfa, his octogenarian…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• A Guardian and a Thief

  Majumdar, Megha

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  FINALIST. ""In a near-future Kolkata beset by flooding and famine, Ma, her two-year-old daughter, and her elderly father are just days from leaving the collapsing city behind to join Ma’s husband in Ann Arbor, Michigan. After procuring long-awaited…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The Antidote

  Russell, Karen, 1981-

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  FINALIST. "The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the dust bowl drought but beneath its own violent…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• North Sun, Or, The Voyage of the Whaleship Esther

  a Novel

  Rutherford, Ethan

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  FINALIST. "Setting out from New Bedford in 1878, the crew of the Esther is confident the sea will be theirs: in addition to cruising the Pacific for whale, they intend to hunt the teeming northern grounds before the ice closes. But as they sail to…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Palaver

  Washington, Bryan

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  FINALIST. "In Tokyo, the son works as an English tutor and drinks his nights away with friends at a gay bar. He’s entangled in a sexual relationship with a married man, and while he has built a chosen family in Japan, he is estranged from his mother…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The Wilderness

  a Novel

  Flournoy, Angela

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  "Desiree, Danielle, January, Monique, and Nakia are in their early twenties and at the beginning. Of their careers, of marriage, of motherhood, and of big-city lives in New York and Los Angeles. Together, they are finding their way through the…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Flashlight

  a Novel

  Choi, Susan, 1969-

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  "One summer night, Louisa and her father take a walk on the breakwater. Her father is carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later, Louisa is found on the beach, soaked to the skin, barely alive. Her father is gone. She is ten years old. Louisa is…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The Sisters

  a Novel

  Khemiri, Jonas Hassen, 1978-

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  "Meet the Mikkola sisters: Ina, Evelyn, and Anastasia. Their mother is a Tunisian carpet seller, their father a mysterious Swede who left them when they were young. Ina is tall, serious, a compulsive organizer. Evelyn is dreamy, magnetic, a smooth…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Only Son by Kevin Moffett

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  "Florida, 1982. A nine-year-old watches as his dead father’s possessions are hauled away: his clothes and tools, his faux-leather recliner. His sensei says it’s a perfect time to turn his weaknesses into weapons. His PE teacher says he runs like a…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Pelican Child

  Williams, Joy

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  "The sentences of Joy Williams are like no other—the coiled wit, the sense of a confused and ruined landscape, even the slight chortle of hope that lurks between the words—for the scrupulous effort of telling, in these 11 stories, has a ravishing…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• 2025 National Book Awards Longlist for Nonfiction - National Book Foundation

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  "The 2025 Nonfiction Longlist features biography, criticism, memoir, reportage, science writing, and more, and all of the Longlisted authors are newcomers to the National Book Awards."

• One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

  El Akkad, Omar, 1982-

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  WINNER. "On October 25, 2023, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable,…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Motherland

  a Feminist History of Modern Russia, From Revolution to Autocracy

  Ioffe, Julia

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  FINALIST. "In 1990, seven-year-old Julia Ioffe and her family fled the Soviet Union. Nearly 20 years later, Ioffe returned to Moscow—only to discover just how much Russian society had changed while she had been living in America. The Soviet women…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Things in Nature Merely Grow

  Li, Yiyun, 1972-

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  FINALIST. "“There is no good way to say this,” Yiyun Li writes at the beginning of this book. “There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged. My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at 16, James…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care by Claudia Rowe

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  FINALIST. "In Wards of the State, Claudia Rowe offers readers a deep understanding of the foster care-to-prison pipeline. Through interviews with psychologists, advocates, judges, and the former foster children themselves, Rowe paints a…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• When It All Burns

  Fighting Fire in a Transformed World

  Thomas, Jordan (Anthropologist)

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  FINALIST. "Eighteen of California’s largest wildfires on record have burned in the past two decades. Scientists recently invented the term “megafire” to describe wildfires that behave in ways that would have been nearly impossible just a generation…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Black Moses

  a Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State

  Gayle, Caleb

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  "Caleb Gayle recounts the tale of Edward McCabe, a Black man who championed the audacious idea to create a state within the Union governed by and for Black people—and the racism, politics, and greed that thwarted him. As the sweeping changes and…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• For the Sun After Long Nights

  the Story of Iran's Women-led Uprising

  Jamalpour, Fatemeh

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  "In September 2022, a young Kurdish woman, Mahsa Jîna Amini, died after being beaten by police officers who arrested her for not adhering to the Islamic Republic’s dress code. Her death galvanized thousands of Iranians—mostly women—who took to the…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam by Lana Lin

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  "In her 1933 The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein invented a new literary form by narrating her own story from the perspective of her partner, blurring the lines between portrait and self-portrait. Almost a century later,…Read moreRead more of this annotation