National Book Award Finalists 2023

Also a finalist for our own Discover Prize, this is an explosive, unrelenting and ultimately compassionate story about a not so unbelievable future. Listen in as Nana-Kwame riffs on love, building community, the craft of writing and more on our Poured Over podcast.

Aaliyah Bilal taught herself to write short fiction by reading and re-reading the stories and novels of Edward P. Jones, and the result is this luminous, indelible debut story collection. Aaliyah joined us on our Poured Over podcast to talk about her journey as a writer and more. (Her part of the episode starts at 39:39)

Paul Harding made his name when his gorgeous debut novel, Tinkers, won the Pulitzer Prize; This Other Eden an intricate novel inspired by the fascinating true story of Malaga, an island in Maine that held one of the first integrated communities after the Civil War. Paul sat down for a wide-ranging conversation on our Poured Over podcast.

Cultures collide in this epic love story in the vein of Cold Mountain and The Great Circle, in this novel about a young reindeer herder and a minister’s daughter in the nineteenth century Arctic Circle.

We’re still thinking about Justin Torres’s debut, We the Animals, more than a decade after it was first published. His second novel is a book about a book, a story about who gets to tell stories (and how), family and more. His episode of our Poured Over podcast airs on October 10th. Follow Poured Over on your favorite podcast app, or catch this episode on B&N’s YouTube channel or here on the B&N Reads blog.

Distinguished scholar and historian, Ned Blackhawk urges a conversation-shifting change in our historical perspective — one that places Indigenous history front, center and essential to the accurate rendering of America’s fuller story. Blackhawk’s book sets a new paradigm.

Scholar, novelist, poet and sister Cristina Rivera Garza searches for an old, unresolved criminal file in Mexico City — even though she knows that now, in 2019, her chances of recovering the record of her sister’s 1990 murder, are slim to none. This is the account—and the outcome—of her extraordinary quest.
 

A compassionate, bold and poetic memoir told in an unfolding of notes-to-self, this book navigates race, resistance, identity, creativity, love and family. Evocative and kaleidoscopic, Ordinary Notes has a palpable music in its play of memory and juxtaposition. Christina talks about her literary influences and the creation of her remarkable book on our Poured Over podcast.

Aziz Shehadeh was many things: lawyer, activist, political detainee, and father; this memoir is a layered portrait of a father and his son, of home and freedom and more.

This is a riveting journey through the intertwined histories of North America’s oil industry and the birth of climate science, the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern forest fires, and lives forever changed by these disasters. 

Formally restless and relentlessly instructive, How to Communicate is a dynamic journey through language, community, and the unfolding of an identity. Poet John Lee Clark pivots from inventive forms inspired by the Braille slate to sensuous prose poems to incisive erasures that find new narratives in nineteenth-century poetry.

This book is the fifth collection in Craig Santos Perez’s ongoing from unincorporated territory series about the history of his homeland, the western Pacific island of Guåhan (Guam), and the culture of his indigenous Chamoru people.

Brandon Som follows up his award-winning debut with a book of poems built out of a multicultural, multigenerational childhood home, in which he celebrates his Chicana grandmother, who worked nights on the assembly line at Motorola, and his Chinese American father and grandparents, who ran the family corner store.

In her new poetry collection, Evie Shockley mobilizes visual art, sound, and multilayered language to chart routes towards openings for the collective dreaming of a more capacious “we.” How do we navigate between the urgency of our own becoming and the imperative insight that whoever we are, we are in relation to each other?

Monica Youn’s From From brilliantly evokes the conflicted consciousness of deracination. If you have no core of “authenticity,” no experience of your so-called homeland, how do you piece together an Asian American identity out of Westerners’ ideas about Asians?

An interesting, strange, and horrific world — summed up in ten short stories that we’re still thinking about. (“Resonates” is the word that hangs in the air at the end of each story.)

Paris, 1806. A renowned botanist lies on his deathbed, the masterwork to which he dedicated his life incomplete. His last word a woman’s name, Maram. Fantastical and tragic, this is a book about a book, a mystery, a love affair and more.

A novel that explores the universal power of the written word and language, and the power they hold in human relationships. Explore Brazil’s little-known hinterland as well its urban haunts, in this story of repression and shame, survival and endurance.

A vivid portrait of childhood and Cali, Colombia. Unhappy parents, an interloper…Eight-year-old Claudia’s acute observations remind us that children are capable of discerning extremely complex realities even if they cannot fully understand them.

Translated for the first time into English, this classic of queer literature, the story of a courageous Black woman trying to live a life of her choosing, is as electrifying today as it was when it originally appeared in 1982.

Emotionally harrowing yet ultimately hopeful, this story of one teen’s journey to save his family in the face of his mother’s opioid addiction is a striking example of resilience.

This laugh-out-loud graphic novel sequel to Huda F Are You? Follows the Fahmy family to on a 24-hour road trip to Disney World. With four sisters fighting for space (and air) in the back of a car, what could go wrong?

In the first book written AND illustrated by award-winning dynamo Vashti Harrison, Big beautifully details a child’s journey to self-acceptance and highlights the impact of words – how they can both hurt and heal. Like the message in this book, Big is oversized and overflowing with thought, care and love.

Alternating timelines between past and present, The Lost Year is a stunning story of family secrets and hidden history, giving readers insight into 1930s Ukraine and the Holodomor famine. This unputdownable read based on the author’s own family history is both heartbreaking and hopeful.

Inspired by his own life, Dan Santat’s A First Time for Everything is a transformative coming-of-age tale perfect for young people on the cusp of all of their big adolescent firsts – as well as adults wishing to reminisce on their own.