National Book Award Finalists 2025Like this list

25 items

• The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother)

  Alameddine, Rabih,

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  Shortlisted in the Fiction category, Alameddine chronicles a Lebanese family’s turbulent but happy lives in his ebullient latest (after The Wrong End of the Telescope).

• A Guardian and a Thief

  a Novel

  Majumdar, Megha

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  Shortlisted in the Fiction category, Majumdar (A Burning) spins a luminous story of a family facing climate catastrophe and food scarcity in near-future Kolkata.

• The Antidote

  a Novel

  Russell, Karen

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  Shortlisted in the Fiction category, the spellbinding latest from Russell (Swamplandia!) infuses a Dust Bowl epic with gothic melodrama.

• North Sun

  Or, The Voyage Of The Whaleship Esther

  Rutherford, Ethan,

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  Shortlisted in the Fiction category, the evocative first novel from Rutherford (after the story collection Farthest South) depicts the end of the whaling era in the late 1870s.

• Palaver

  a Novel

  Washington, Bryan, 1993-

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  Washington revisits the Japanese setting of his novel Memorial with a bighearted drama about a 30-something Houston man’s reunion with his estranged mother in this finalist in the Fiction category.

• One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

  El Akkad, Omar, 1982-

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  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 which doesn’t consider you fully human. Shortlisted in the Nonfiction category.

• Things in Nature Merely Grow

  Li, Yiyun, 1972-

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  Shortlisted in Nonfiction. Yiyun Li’s remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance as she considers the loss of her son James. TRIGGER WARNING: Suicide of a family member (son).

• Motherland

  a Feminist History of Modern Russia, From Revolution to Autocracy

  Ioffe, Julia

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  Shortlisted in Nonfiction. Award-winning journalist Julia Ioffe tells the story of modern Russia through the history of its women, from revolution to utopia to autocracy.

• Wards of the State

  the Long Shadow of American Foster Care

  Rowe, Claudia, 1966-

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  Shortlisted in Nonfiction. Told through the stories of six former foster youth, a jolting exploration of a broken system from an award-winning journalist.

• When It All Burns

  Fighting Fire in a Transformed World

  Thomas, Jordan (Anthropologist),

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  Shortlisted in Nonfiction. 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.

• The New Economy by Gabrielle Calvocoressi

  View on coppercanyonpress.org

  The New Economy memorializes the world’s pleasures and perils told through the point of view of an aging, ungendered body. Finalist in Poetry.

• Becoming Ghost by Cathy Linh Che

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  The long-awaited sophomore poetry collection by award-winning writer Cathy Linh Che, on familial estrangement, the Vietnam War, and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Poetry Finalist.

• Scorched Earth

  Clark, Tiana,

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  Poetry Finalist. The striking sophomore poetry collection from the award-winning author of the “beautiful, vulnerable, honest” (Ross Gay, New York Times bestselling author) I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood.

• I Do Know Some Things by Richard Siken

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  Shortlisted in Poetry. 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…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The Intentions of Thunder by Patricia Smith

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  Shortlisted in Poetry. A collection of the finest new and selected poems from one of the most groundbreaking voices in contemporary poetry, a “masterful performer and poet of voices too little heard” (Poetry Foundation).

• A World Worth Saving

  Lukoff, Kyle,

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  Young People's Literature Finalist. A groundbreaking, action-packed, and ultimately uplifting adventure that intertwines elements of Jewish mythology with an unflinching examination of the impacts of transphobia, from Newbery Honor-winner Kyle…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The Leaving Room

  McBride, Amber

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  Young People's Literature Finalist. 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.

• The Teacher of Nomad Land

  a World War II Story

  Nayeri, Daniel,

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  Young People's Literature Finalist. 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…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Truth Is

  Sawyerr, Hannah V.,

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  Young People's Literature Finalist. Seventeen-year-old poet Truth Bangura begins senior year unsure of life after graduation, but when she learns she's pregnant by her ex-boyfriend, she makes one decision she is sure about—an abortion. When Truth…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• (s)kin

  Zoboi, Ibi Aanu

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  Young People's Literature Finalist. From award-winning, New York Times bestselling author Ibi Zoboi comes her groundbreaking contemporary fantasy debut—a novel in verse based on Caribbean folklore—about the power of inherited magic and the price we…Read moreRead more of this annotation