National Book Awards 2025

"From the inimitable Rabih Alameddine-National Book Award finalist and winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award-comes a tragicomic saga set in Lebanon, a modern story of family, memory, and the unbreakable attachment of a son and his mother. Across his oeuvre, Rabih Alameddine has distinguished himself as a master of the intimate and the political, celebrated for his caustic wit and "compelling, often jarring, blend of cynicism and hope" (The Economist). In this lively new work, Alameddine returns to Beirut-the setting of his breakout novel An Unnecessary Woman-and delivers a compulsively readable story of a winning duo navigating modern life in Lebanon. In a tiny Beirut apartment, sixty-three-year-old Raja and his mother live side by side. A beloved high schoolphilosophy teacher and "the neighborhood homosexual," Raja relishes books, meditative walks, order, and solitude. Zalfa, his octogenarian mother, views her son's desire for privacy as a personal affront. She demands to know every detail of Raja's work life and love life, boundaries be damned. When Raja receives an invite to an all-expenses-paid writing residency in America, the timing couldn't be better. It arrives on the heels of a series of personal and national disasters that have left Raja itching forpeace and quiet away from his mother and the heartache of Lebanon. But what at first seems a stroke of good fortune soon leads Raja to recount and relive the very disasters and past betrayals he wishes to forget. Told in Raja's irresistible and wickedlyfunny voice, the novel dances across six decades to tell the unforgettable story of a singular life and its absurdities-a tale of mistakes, self-discovery, trauma, and maybe even forgiveness. Above all, The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) is a wildly unique and sparkling celebration of love"-- Provided by publisher.

Megha Majumdar’s electrifying new novel, following her acclaimed New York Times bestseller A Burning—longlisted for the National Book Award—is set in a near-future Kolkata, India, ravaged by climate change and food scarcity, in which two families seeking to protect their children must battle each other. A piercing and propulsive tour de force.

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 visas from the consulate, they pack their bags for the flight to America. But in the morning they awaken to discover that Ma’s purse, containing their treasured immigration documents, has been stolen.

Set over the course of one week, A Guardian and a Thief tells two stories: the story of Ma’s frantic search for the thief while keeping hunger at bay during a worsening food shortage; and the story of Boomba, the thief, whose desperation to care for his family drives him to commit a series of escalating crimes whose consequences he cannot fathom. With stunning control and command, Megha Majumdar paints a kaleidoscopic portrait of two families, each operating from a place of ferocious love and undefeated hope, each discovering how far they will go to secure their children’s future as they stave off encroaching catastrophe.

A masterful new work from one of the most exciting voices of her generation.

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 histories. The Antidote follows a "Prairie Witch," whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples' memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch's apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town's secrets and its fate.

"From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in the heart of an empire that doesn't consider you fully human. On October 25th, 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, everyone will have always been against this." This tweet was viewed more than ten million times. One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This chronicles the deep fracture that has occurred for Black, brown, Indigenous Americans, as well as the upcoming generation, many of whom had clung to a thread of faith in Western ideals, in the idea that their countries, or the countries of their adoption, actually attempted to live up to the values they espouse"--

n 1990, seven-year-old Julia Ioffe and her family fled the Soviet Union. Nearly twenty 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 she had known growing up—doctors, engineers, scientists—had seemingly been replaced with women desperate to marry rich and become stay-at-home moms. How had Russia gone from portraying itself as the vanguard of world feminism to the last bastion of conservative Christian values?

In Motherland, Ioffe turns modern Russian history on its head, telling it exclusively through the stories of its women. From her own physician great-grandmothers to Lenin’s lover, a feminist revolutionary; from the hundreds of thousands of Soviet girls who fought in World War II to the millions of single mothers who rebuilt and repopulated a devastated country; from the members of Pussy Riot to Yulia Navalnaya, wife of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, she chronicles one of the most audacious social experiments in history and how it failed the very women it was meant to liberate—and documents how that failure paved the way to the revanche of Vladimir Putin.

Part memoir, part journalistic exploration, part history, Motherland paints a portrait of modern Russia through the women who shaped it. With deep emotion, Ioffe shows what it means to live through the cataclysms of revolution, war, idealism, and heartbreak—and reveals how the story of Russia today is inextricably tied to the history of its women.

"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 sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home." There is no good way to say this--because words fall short. It takes only an instant for death to become fact, "a single point in a timeline." Living now on this single point, Li turns to thinking and reasoning and searching for words that might hold a place for James. Li does what she "doing the things that work," including not just writing but gardening, reading Camus and Wittgenstein, learning the piano, and living thinkingly alongside death. This is a book for James, but it is not a book about grieving or mourning. As Li writes, "The verb that does not die is to be. Vincent was and is and will always be Vincent. James was and is and will always be James. We were and are and will always be their parents. There is no now and then, now and later, only, now and now and now and now." Things in Nature Merely Grow is a testament to Li's indomitable spirit.

A compelling exploration of the broken American foster care system, told through the stories of six former foster youth. This powerful narrative nonfiction book delves into the systemic failures that lead many foster children into the criminal justice system, highlighting the urgent need for reform. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in child welfare, social justice, and the transformative power of the best narrative nonfiction. In Wards of the State, award-winning journalist Claudia Rowe's storytelling is both vivid and unflinching, offering 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 heartbreaking picture of the lives shaped by this broken system. Rowe brings her extensive experience and investigative prowess to this eye-opening work.

"An anthropologist and hotshot firefighter's gripping firsthand account of a record-setting fire season. 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 impossible just a generation ago, burning through winter, exploding in the night, and devastating landscapes historically impervious to incendiary destruction. Wildland firefighters must navigate these new scales of destruction in real time. In When It All Burns, Jordan Thomas recounts a single, brutal six-month fire season with the Los Padres Hotshots-the special forces of America's firefighters. Being a hotshot is among the most difficult jobs on Earth. Their training is as grueling as any Navy SEAL's, and the social induction is even tougher. As Thomas viscerally renders his crew's attempts to battle flames that are often too destructive to contain, he uncovers the hidden cultural history of megafires. He investigates how a social system that prioritizes profit over people and nature has turned humanity's symbiotic relationship with wildfire into a war-and what can be done to change it back. Thomas weaves ecology and the history of indigenous oppression, federal forestry, and the growth of the fire industrial complex into an expansive, riveting narrative of a new phase in the climate crisis. Above all, he immerses readers in a story of friendship and community in the most perilous of circumstances, told with humor, humility, and affection"--

*2025 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD Longlist*I Do Know Some Things is a brave book, both in content and method.It is brave to write about childhood scars and the heartbreak the dead leave behind. It is brave to reconfigure one's life in the aftermath of a stroke. Richard Siken presents these subjects directly, without ornament, and with nothing to hide behind, confronting the fact that he can no longer manipulate the constructions of form, or speak lies that tell the truth. In spite of these limitations, Siken chooses to write these poems and release them into a dangerous world. Each image, each sentence, is as direct as the American artist Jasper Johns's shooting targets. Each poem is like a small room in a house, a room where you will be punched in the throat. As he claws himself back into a self, into a body, Siken has written a book that is unsettling and autobiographical by necessity, and its seventy-seven prose poems invite the reader to risk a difficult intimacy in search of yet deeper truths.

Tara Selter, the heroine of On the Calculation of Volume, has involuntarily stepped off the train of time: in her world, November 18th repeats itself endlessly. We meet Tara on her 122nd November 18th: she no longer experiences the changes of days, weeks, months, or seasons. She finds herself in a lonely new reality without being able to explain why: how is it that she wakes every morning into the same day, knowing to the exact second when the blackbird will burst into song and when the rain will begin? Will she ever be able to share her new life with her beloved and now chronically befuddled husband? And on top of her profound isolation and confusion, Tara takes in with pain how slight a difference she makes in the world. (As she puts it: "That's how little the activities of one person matter on the 18th of November.") Balle is hypnotic and masterful in her remixing of the endless recursive day, creating curious little folds of time and foreshadowings: her memories of the past light up inside the text like old-fashioned flash bulbs. The first volume's gravitational pull-a force inverse to its constriction- has the effect of a strong tranquilizer, but a drug under which your powers of observation only grow sharper and more acute. Give in to the book's logic (the thrilling shifts, the minute movements, the slant wit, the slowing of time), and its spell is utterly intoxicating.--

After coming out as trans, fourteen-year-old A is forced to attend weekly Save Our Sons and Daughters meetings, where he uncovers the terrifying truth that the group is run by a demon feeding on their pain and is part of a larger, darker force preying on the world's vulnerable.

For fans of You've Reached Sam and If I Stay, a hauntingly beautiful young adult novel-in-verse about a girl in between life and death, by National Book Award Finalist Amber McBride.

<b>Page-turning WW2 hidden history masterfully told by award winner Daniel Nayeri</b> <p/> 1941. The German armies are storming across Europe. Iran is a neutral country occupied by British forces on one side, Soviet forces on another. Soldiers fill the teahouses of Isfahan. Nazi spies roam the alleyways. <p/> Babak and his little sister have just lost their father. Now orphans, fearing they will be separated, the two devise a plan. Babak will take up his father's old job as a teacher to the nomads. With a chalkboard strapped to Babak's back, and a satchel full of textbooks, the siblings set off to find the nomad tribes as they make their yearly trek across the mountains. <p/> On the treacherous journey they meet a Jewish boy, hiding from a Nazi spy. And suddenly, they are all in a race for survival. <p/> Against the backdrop of World War II comes an epic adventure in the faraway places. Through the cacophony of soldiers, tanks, and planes, can young hearts of different creeds and nations learn to find a common language? <p/> Master storyteller Daniel Nayeri keeps you on the edge of your seat, uncertain to the very end.

Seventeen-year-old Truth uses slam poetry to address her personal struggles with college, relationships, and an unexpected pregnancy, but she never intended for a video of her poem to go viral.

"Fifteen-year-old Marisol is the daughter of a soucouyant. Every new moon, she sheds her skin like the many women before her, shifting into a fireball witch who must fly into the night and slowly sip from the lives of others to sustain her own. But Brooklyn is no place for fireball witches with all its bright lights, shut windows, and bolt-locked doors. While Marisol hoped they would leave their old traditions behind when they emigrated from the islands, she knows this will never happen while she remains ensnared by the one person who keeps her chained to her magical past, her mother. Seventeen-year-old Genevieve is the daughter of a college professor and a newly minted older half sister of twins. Her worsening skin condition and the babies' constant wailing keep her up at night, when she stares at the dark sky with a deep longing to inhale it all. She hopes to quench the hunger that gnaws at her, one that seems to reach for some memory of her estranged mother. When a new nanny arrives to help with the twins, a family secret connecting her to Marisol is revealed, and Gen begins to find answers to questions she hasn't even thought to ask. But the girls soon discover that the very skin keeping their flames locked beneath the surface may be more explosive to the relationships around them than any ancient magic"--