The National Book Award Finalists (2024)

“Percival Everett’s reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn centers Jim, an enslaved runaway who was relegated to the role of a mild-mannered companion in Mark Twain’s original telling. As Jim and Huck journey down the Mississippi River, readers see the world through James’s point of view—as he adjusts his language, mannerisms, and appearance to both appease the white people around him and to protect his own life. James considers authorial intent and the possibilities of agency, even within the most racist and inequitable contexts.”

“Impending death haunts the debut novel Martyr!, in which the poet Cyrus Shams grapples with the loss that has permeated his life... alongside Cyrus’s own alcohol and drug addiction recovery. As his obsession with martyrs grows, Cyrus tasks himself with uncovering his family’s past, writing a novel, and meeting a terminally ill Iranian artist living out her last days at the Brooklyn Museum, in Kaveh Akbar’s contemplation of grief, addiction, love, and finding hope and meaning in art.”

“My Friends by Hisham Matar follows Khaled and two friends living in exile in Britain as they come together and apart over decades, wrestling with revolution, war, and their loyalties to themselves and to their homeland.”

“In All Fours, when an unnamed 45-year-old female artist drives from Los Angeles to New York City for a two-week writing retreat, she spontaneously discards her plans and checks into a nondescript motel and begins to spend time with a married 31-year-old man, commissioning his wife to redecorate her rented room, and daring to imagine an entirely new way of living. Miranda July tells the story of one woman’s—at times desperate—desire to reinvent her life and to create art in the face of monotony, menopause, and mortality.”

“Set in Lagos, Nigeria, the narrators in Ghostroots’ 12 stories reckon with every-day horror: infidelity, mysterious diseases, recollections of a tragic accident, and the pain of seeing their loved ones deteriorate. Throughout this debut collection, ’Pemi Aguda compassionately explores a cast of characters haunted by regrets and searching for freedom from the ghosts of their ancestors.”

"In his memoir, Salman Rushdie candidly recounts the 2022 attack on his life, its immediate aftermath, and his ongoing journey of physical rehabilitation and healing. Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder is a deeply intimate account, at once corporeal and metaphysical, that wrestles with artmaking, community, and the power of literature to make sense of the unimaginable."

"For seven years, anthropologist Jason De León embedded himself within a group of human smugglers—or coyotes— hired by migrants to cross from Central America and Mexico into the United States in Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling. In this rare, in-depth look at the lives of informants, gang leaders, and guides, De León documents the intergenerational trauma, cycles of violence, and scarcity of economic opportunities that fuel the mass movement of undocumented immigrants north in search of the American Dream."

"Drawing on deep reporting, Eliza Griswold examines the progressive Christian church, Circle of Hope—from its founding in 1996, its expansion in the 2010s into four Northeastern congregations, and the fissures that emerged when the COVID-19 pandemic made it impossible to gather for in-person worship. Told through profiles of four young pastors, Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church chronicles the church’s anti-racist politics and members’ biases; the rise in social activism movements across the country; and what it means to build an equitable future rooted in faith."

"Born on the California Yuma reservation and raised in Navajo territory in New Mexico by parents determined to assimilate, Deborah Jackson Taffa explores her family’s history of displacement within the United States and considers how she came to understand and claim her mixed-tribe Native identity. Whiskey Tender traces Taffa’s adolescence on and off the reservation in a moving excavation of her family’s history; the long legacy of erasure, violence, and injustice faced by Native peoples; and finding a balance between two cultural landscapes."

"Blending lived experience with meticulous research, Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia asserts that weight stigma and discrimination play a part in all aspects of society, including healthcare, education, and employment. Kate Manne argues that fatphobia harms not just individuals, but entire communities and cultures, and coins the term 'body reflexivity'—a new politics that reexamines and deconstructs why bodies exist in the first place and seeks to build a world that is welcoming for people of all sizes."