Sept. 26, 2025 – The National Book Foundation has announced the National Book Award longlist of finalists, and the library has many of the books available to borrow - especially in the fiction, nonfiction, and young people's literature categories. Other categories are poetry and translated literature.
The National Book Awards were established in 1950 to celebrate the best writing in the United States. Since 1989, the Awards have been overseen by the National Book Foundation, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to celebrate the best literature published in the United States, expand its audience, and ensure that books have a prominent place in our culture.
The finalists will be announced Oct. 7, and the winners in all five categories will be announced Nov. 19. In the meantime, you can read some of what the National Book Foundation considers the best books of the year. Find descriptions of the books, pulled from the National Book Award website, below, and put individual titles on hold in our catalog by clicking on their covers.
2025 Longlist for the National Book Award for Fiction
"The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother)" by Rabih Alameddine
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 longing for peace 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.
"Flashlight" by Susan Choi
Louisa is an only child of parents who have severed themselves from the past. Her father, Serk, is Korean, but was born and raised in Japan; he lost touch with his family when they bought into the promises of postwar Pyongyang and relocated to North Korea. Her American mother, Anne, is estranged from her Midwestern family after a reckless adventure in her youth. And then there is Tobias, Anne’s illegitimate son, whose reappearance in their lives will have astonishing consequences.
"The Wilderness" by Angela Flournoy
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 wilderness, that period of life when the reality of contemporary adulthood—overwhelming, mysterious, and full of freedom and consequences—swoops in and stays.
"The Sisters" Jonas Hassen Khemiri
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. Following the sisters from afar is Jonas, the son of a Swedish mother and a Tunisian father. Over the course of three decades, his life intersects with the sisters, from a chance encounter in Tunis to the scene of a fighter jet crash in Stockholm. When Evelyn disappears on a trip to New York, Jonas manages to track her down—and helps her to break the curse that has been looming over the Mikkolas for decades. In the process, a shocking revelation changes everything about who they think they are.
"A Guardian and a Thief" by Megha Majumdar
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.
"Only Son" by Kevin Moffett
Florida, 1982. A nine-year-old watches as his dead father’s possessions are hauled away: his clothes and tools, his faux-leather recliner. Twenty-five years later, adrift in suburban Southern California, married with a son of his own, he’s still trying to sort through the fragments of his father’s death while imparting his own sketchy education onto his son. After discovering a travel journal he didn’t know his father kept, he and his son light out on a road trip, retracing the father’s mystifying journey. As he strains to decipher his father’s notes, his relationship with his son begins to take on new heft and shape.
"The Antidote" by Karen Russell
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.
"North Sun: Or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther" by Ethan Rutherford
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 their final destination in the Chukchi Sea, where their captain Arnold Lovejoy has an urgent directive of his own to attend to, their encounters with the natural world become more brutal, harrowing, ghostly, and strange.
"Palaver" by Bryan Washington
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 in Houston, whose preference for the son’s oft-troubled homophobic brother, Chris, pushed him to leave home. Then, in the weeks leading up to Christmas, ten years since they last saw each other, the mother arrives uninvited on his doorstep.
"The Pelican Child" by Joy Williams
In these 11 stories, we meet lost souls like the twin-sister heiresses of a dirty industrial fortune in “After the Haiku Period,” who must commit a violent act in recompense for their family’s deeds; in “Nettle,” a newly grown man who still revolves in a dreamscape of his childhood boarding-school innocence; the ghost of George Gurdieff, on an obsessive visit to the Arizona birthplace of the shining Susan Sontag; the “pelican child” who lives with the bony, ill-tempered Baba Yaga in a little hut on chicken legs.
2025 Longlist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction
"One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This" by Omar El Akkad
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, everyone will have always been against this.” This tweet has been viewed more than 10 million times.
"Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State" by Caleb Gayle
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.
"Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy" by Julia Ioffe
Part memoir, part journalistic exploration, part history, Motherland paints a portrait of modern Russia through the women who shaped it. 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.
"For the Sun After Long Nights: The Story of Iran’s Women-Led Uprising" by Fatemeh Jamalpour and Nilo Tabrizy
Despite the threat of imprisonment or death for her work as a journalist covering political unrest, state repression, and grassroots activism in Iran—which has led to multiple interrogation sessions and arrests—Fatemeh Jamalpour joined the throngs of people fighting to topple Iran’s religious extremist regime. And across the globe, Nilo Tabrizy, who emigrated from Iran with her family as a child, covered the protests and state violence, knowing that spotlighting the women on the front lines and the systemic injustice of the Iranian government meant she would not be able to safely return to Iran in the future.
"Things in Nature Merely Grow" by Yiyun Li
“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 in 2024, at 19. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home.” 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.”
"The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam" Lana Lin
At heart a candid chronicle of her partner Lan Thao’s life journey from Việt Nam during the war, and her own troubled history as a gender-queer Taiwanese American, Lin draws in subjects as varied as photography, cancer, tropical fruit, 9/11, and Eve Sedgwick’s eyeglasses, weaving an intimate landscape of living that is also a critical investigation of race and gender.
"Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening" Ben Ratliff
Out the front door, across the street, down the hill, and into Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. This is how Ben Ratliff’s runs started most days of the week for about a decade. Sometimes listening to music, not always. Then, at the beginning of the pandemic, he began taking notes about what he listened to. He wondered if a body in motion, his body, was helping him to listen better to the motion in music.
"Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care" by Claudia Rowe
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 heartbreaking picture of the lives shaped by this broken system.
"When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World" by Jordan Thomas
In When It All Burns, wildland firefighter and anthropologist 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. 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, revealing how humanity’s symbiotic relationship with wildfire became a war—and what can be done to change it back.
"The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life" Helen Whybrow
The Salt Stones offers an intimate and profoundly moving story of what it means to care for a flock and truly inhabit a piece of land. The shepherd’s life unfolds for Whybrow in the seasons and cycles of farming and family—birthing lambs, fending off coyotes, rescuing lost sheep in a storm, and raising children while witnessing her mother’s decline.
2025 Longlist for the National Book Award for Poetry
"Death Does Not End at the Sea" by Gbenga Adesina
Adesina’s Death Does Not End at the Sea explores the complexity of elusive citizenship, an immigrant’s brokenhearted prayer for a new beginning, a chorus of elegies, and a cosmic love song between the living and the dead.
"The New Economy" by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
In Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s latest collection, The New Economy, poems are haunted by the ghosts of loved ones and childhood memories, by changing landscapes and bodies.
"Becoming Ghost" by Cathy Linh Che
Becoming Ghost documents Cathy Linh Che’s parents’ experiences as refugees who escaped the Vietnam War and then were cast as extras in Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now, placing them at the margins of their own story.
"Scorched Earth" by Tiana Clark
Dive between the borders of ruined and radical love with this lyrical poetry collection that explores topics as expansive as divorce, the first Black Bachelorette, and the art world.
"Death of the First Idea" by Rickey Laurentiis
Laurentiis meditates on what it means to be trans and Black in this nation and in her own body, when both demarcations are often excuses for violence.
"Cold Thief Place" by Esther Lin
This is a family story. It tells of a mother who fled an authoritarian government and turned that authoritarianism on to her children. Of a father who made a new life—three times on three different continents—and his sea voyage in between. Or what a daughter imagines of these events, as much as it’s possible to truly know one’s parents. The narrator, who is their daughter, grew up in difficult but very different circumstances, too: undocumented in the United States and was pressured into a green card marriage in order to live a “normal life.”
"Stay Dead" by Natalie Shapero
The politics of labor and performance collide with comedy and tragedy in Natalie Shapero’s Stay Dead. Shapero’s unflinching poems explore theories of acting, discourses of survival, privacy and publicity, power and punchlines, and the language of despair.
"I Do Know Some Things" by Richard Siken
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.
"The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems" by Patricia Smith
The Intentions of Thunder gathers, for the first time, the essential work from across Patricia Smith’s career. Here, Smith’s poems, affixed with her remarkable gift of insight, present a rapturous ode to life.
"TERROR COUNTER" by Fargo Nissim Tbakhi
The voices in this collection are driven by despair, futility, utopia, vulnerability, and the spirit of a collective liberation; they move in search of a lyrical voice which can inhabit both the paranoid preservationist mode that facilitates Palestinian survival, and the imaginative possibilities that might make possible Palestinian life.
2025 Longlist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature
"On the Calculation of Volume (Book III)" by Solvej Balle, translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell
In the third installment of Balle’s septology, Tara’s November 18th transforms when she discovers that she is no longer alone in her endless autumnal day. For she has met someone who remembers, and who knows as well as she does that “it is autumn, but that we’re not heading into winter. That spring and summer will not follow. That the reds and yellows of the trees are here to stay.”
"The Queen of Swords" by Jazmina Barrera, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney
Who was Elena Garro, really? She was a writer, a founder of “magical realism,” a dancer. A devotee to the tarot and the I Ching. A socialite and activist on behalf of indigenous Mexicans. She was a mother and a lover who repeatedly shook off (and cheated on) her manipulative husband, Nobel-laureate Octavio Paz. And above all, she wrote with simmering anger and glittering imagination.
"We Are Green and Trembling" by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers
Deep in the wilds of the New World, Antonio de Erauso begins to write a letter to his aunt, the prioress of the Basque convent he escaped as a young girl. Since fleeing a dead-end life as a nun, he’s become Antonio and undertaken monumental adventures: he has been a cabin boy, mule driver, shopkeeper, soldier, and conquistador. Now, caring for two Guaraní girls he rescued from enslavement and hounded by the army he deserted, this protean protagonist contemplates one more metamorphosis.
"The Remembered Soldier" by Anjet Daanje, translated from the Dutch by David McKay
Flanders 1922. After serving as a soldier in the Great War, Noon Merckem has lost his memory and lives in a psychiatric asylum. Countless women, responding to a newspaper ad, visit him there in the hope of finding their spouse who vanished in battle. One day a woman, Julienne, appears and recognizes Noon as her husband, the photographer Amand Coppens, and takes him home against medical advice. But their miraculous reunion doesn’t turn out the way that Julienne wants her envious friends to believe. Only gradually do the two grow close, and Amand’s biography is pieced together on the basis of Julienne’s stories about him. But how can he be certain that she’s telling the truth?
"Hunchback" by Saou Ichikawa, translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton
Born with a congenital muscle disorder, Shaka spends her days in her room in a care home outside Tokyo, relying on an electric wheelchair to get around and a ventilator to breathe. But if Shaka’s physical life is limited, her quick, mischievous mind has no boundaries: She takes e-learning courses on her iPad, publishes explicit fantasies on websites, and anonymously troll-tweets to see if anyone is paying attention (“In another life, I’d like to work as a high-class prostitute”). One day, she tweets into the void an offer of an enormous sum of money for a sperm donor. To Shaka’s surprise, her new nurse accepts the dare, unleashing a series of events that will forever change Shaka’s sense of herself as a woman in the world.
"We Computers: A Ghazal Novel" by Hamid Ismailov, translated from the Uzbek by Shelley Fairweather-Vega
In the late 1980s, French poet and psychologist Jon‑Perse finds himself in possession of one of the most promising inventions of the century: a computer. Enchanted by snippets of Persian poetry he learns from his Uzbek translation partner, Abdulhamid Ismail, Jon-Perse builds a computer program capable of both analyzing and generating literature. But beyond the text on his screen there are entire worlds—of history, philosophy, and maybe even of love—in the stories and people he and AI conjure.
"We Do Not Part" by Han Kang, translated from the Korean by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris
One winter morning in Seoul, Kyungha receives an urgent message from her friend Inseon to visit her at the hospital. Inseon has injured herself in an accident, and she begs Kyungha to return to Jeju Island, where she lives, to save her beloved pet—a white bird called Ama. A snowstorm hits the island when Kyungha arrives. She must reach Inseon’s house at all costs, but the icy wind and squalls slow her down as night begins to fall. She wonders if she will arrive in time to save the animal—or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step. Lost in a world of snow, she doesn’t yet suspect the vertiginous plunge into darkness that awaits her at her friend’s house.
"Sleep Phase" by Mohamed Kheir, translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger
After seven years in prison, Warif is released to a changed Cairo. Freedom so far has been endless, inscrutable meetings with official-looking strangers, trying to get his job as a translator back. This new Cairo, busy with expats and bureaucrats, is proving disorienting: what is he supposed to make of these self-assured newcomers who are so certain of his obsolescence, his subjugation, his solitude? They seem happy to provide him with a salary, if he’s willing to give up the work that gave his life meaning. As his encounters more-and-more resemble interrogations and the futility of trying to escape the system set against him threatens to suffocate him, Warif escapes into the vivid colors of the city, looking deeper and deeper into the food, the people, the buildings, and the flowers, until what’s real blurs into fantasy.
"Perfection" by Vincenzo Latronico, translated from the Italian by Sophie Hughes
Anna and Tom, an expat couple, have fashioned a dream life for themselves in Berlin. They are young digital “creatives” exploring the excitements of the city, freelancers without too many constraints, who spend their free time cultivating house plants and their images online. At first, they reasonably deduce that they’ve turned their passion for aesthetics into a viable, even enviable career, but the years go by, and Anna and Tom grow bored. As their friends move back home or move on, so their own work and sex life—and the life of Berlin itself—begin to lose their luster. An attempt to put their politics into action fizzles in embarrassed self-doubt. Edging closer to 40, they try living as digital nomads only to discover that, wherever they go, “the brand of oat milk in their flat whites was the same.”
"Sad Tiger" by Neige Sinno, translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer
Sad Tiger is built on the facts of a series of devastating events. Neige Sinno was seven years old when her stepfather started sexually abusing her and at 14 or 15 the abuse stopped. At 19, she decided to break the silence that is so common in all cultures around sexual violence. This led to a public trial and prison for her stepfather and Sinno started a new life in Mexico.
2025 Longlist for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature
"A Sea of Lemon Trees: The Corrido of Roberto Alvarez" by María Dolores Águila
From critically-acclaimed author María Dolores Águila (Barrio Rising) comes an inspiring debut novel-in-verse set against the backdrop of the Great Depression and Mexican Repatriation, based on the true story of the United States’ first successful school desegregation case, two decades before Brown v. Board of Education ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.
"The Corruption of Hollis Brown" by K. Ancrum
After unknowingly making a deal at the crossroads, Hollis finds himself losing control of his body and mind, falling victim to possession. Walt, the ghost making a home inside him, has a deep and violent history rooted in the town Hollis grew up in, and he has unfinished business to take care of.
"The Incredibly Human Henson Blayze" by Derrick Barnes
Henson’s town is divided into two chaotic sides when all he wants is justice. Even his best friends and his father can’t see eye to eye. When he is told to play ball again or else, Henson must decide whether he was born to entertain people who may not even see him as human, or if he’s destined for a different kind of greatness.
"A Bird in the Air Means We Can Still Breathe" by Mahogany L. Browne
In New York City, teens, their families, and their communities feel the brunt of the COVID-19 pandemic. Amidst the fear and loss, these teens and the adults around them persevere with love and hope while living in difficult circumstances.
"A World Worth Saving" by Kyle Lukoff
Coming out as trans didn’t exactly go well, and most days, A barely leaves his bedroom, let alone the house. But the low point of A’s life isn’t online school, missing his bar mitzvah, or the fact that his parents monitor his phone like hawks—it’s the weekly Save Our Sons and Daughters (SOSAD) meetings his parents all but drag him to. When Yarrow vanishes after a particularly confrontational meeting, A discovers that SOSAD doesn’t just feel soul-sucking…it’s run by an actual demon who feeds off the pain and misery of kids like him. But how is one trans kid who hasn’t even chosen a name supposed to save his friend, let alone the world?
"The Leaving Room" by Amber McBride
Gospel is the Keeper of the Leaving Room—a place all young people must phase through when they die. The young are never ready to leave; they need a moment to remember and a Keeper to help their wispy souls along. When a random door opens and a Keeper named Melodee arrives, their souls become entangled. Gospel’s seriousness melts and Melodee’s fear of connection fades, but still—are Keepers allowed to fall in love?
"The Teacher of Nomad Land: A World War II Story" by Daniel Nayeri
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. On the treacherous journey they meet a Jewish boy, hiding from a Nazi spy. And suddenly, they are all in a race for survival.
"Truth Is" by Hannah V. Sawyerr
At an open mic night, Truth finally gains the courage to perform a piece that dives into her rocky relationship with her mother—and reveals the choice she never told her. But when a video of Truth’s performance is posted online and starts going viral, her decision quickly becomes everyone’s business—including her mother’s.
"Song of a Blackbird" by Maria van Lieshout
In 1943 Amsterdam, Emma Bergsma’s world changes when she witnesses Jewish families being forcibly deported to concentration camps. That pivotal moment lights a fire within her, and she decides to join the Dutch Resistance. In 2011 Amsterdam, teenage Annick’s world has changed as well. A search for a bone marrow donor for her beloved oma leads to a shocking revelation: her grandmother was secretly adopted as a child. The only clues to finding their lost family are a series of art prints hanging on the wall—each signed by a mysterious “Emma B.”
"(S)Kin" by Ibi Zoboi
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. 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.