Five novels have reached the fiction shortlist for this year’s National Book Awards. Their characters have trouble finding a place to call home.
That concern takes several forms in the five novels selected on October 6. In Hannah Lillith Assadi’s Paradiso 17, a Palestinian man approaching death recounts a life uprooted by the Nakba. Edwidge Danticat’s Dèy follows a Haitian American woman attempting to live with the aftermath of a mass shooting in Miami. Valeria Luiselli’s Beginning Middle End examines the stories a mother and daughter tell about their family, and the parts they cannot make agree.
The other finalists, Julián Delgado Lopera’s Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You and Morgan Thomas’s Mad Eden, turn to queer life, family, violence and survival. Delgado Lopera’s novel unfolds in nineteen-nineties Bogotá after a mother’s death. Thomas moves between the experience of a trans healthcare worker and a fantastical story that interrupts the novel’s ostensible reality.
One should be wary of extracting a grand national mood from five novels. Prize juries choose books, not sociological surveys. Still, the recurring questions of home, identity and the obligation to other people are difficult to miss. These are stories in which the family is often the first source of conflict, and occasionally the only available refuge.
The nonfiction finalists expand the field of inquiry. Colin Asher’s The Midnight Special traces the prison history of American music; Abdelrahman ElGendy’s Huna recounts revolution and imprisonment. The poetry shortlist includes Victoria Chang’s Tree of Knowledge and Fady Joudah’s Exhibit G, works whose subjects touch on belonging and dispossession from very different directions.
Translated literature and writing for young people complete the five categories. The latter includes David Levithan and Gabriel Duckels’s The Fight of Our Lives: AIDS in America, which uses multiple forms of testimony to introduce younger readers to an epidemic and the activism it produced.
On November 18, the winners will be announced at a Manhattan ceremony. Salman Rushdie and Perri Klass will receive honorary medals. The evening will turn twenty-five books into five winners, with all the inevitable arguments about omissions and surprises. In the meantime, the longer, more useful pleasure is available without a ticket: choosing a finalist that looks unfamiliar and opening it.
Book details: 2026 National Book Awards · Five categories, 25 finalists · Winners announced November 18, 2026, in New York City. Publisher and publication information.
