A narrator is hospitalized in the ICU during COVID-19 and is forced to confront illness and the dysfunction of American healthcare.

At the edge of illness, the shapes of the body, care, and love come into focus.

A reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from Jim's perspective, centering race, literacy, and agency.

Jim's voice turns a canonical American novel inside out.

A biracial novelist leaves literary fiction for television writing in a sharp satire of publishing and racial fixation.

Between writing and earning, her sense of self begins to slip.

A short-story collection that brings motherhood, identity, and the supernatural into tense collision.

From beneath the ordinary, ghostlike memories begin to sprout.

An episodic novel about three Palestinian immigrant families in Baltimore, exploring generational conflict, class, and belonging.

Within the fractures of family life, a community takes shape.

A Puerto Rican family searches for a missing sister, turning disappearance and family bonds into the novel's emotional core.

A search for a missing sister brings family memory back to the surface.

A story collection tracing how memory, witness, and human relationships shape one another.

The weight of seeing, remembering, and telling.

A queer mountain lion wanders the edges of Los Angeles, turning hunger, loneliness, and desire into a survival story.

A single animal voice illuminates urban loneliness and the hunger to live.

A family novel set in Saigon during the Vietnam War, examining conscience, responsibility, and the cost of moral compromise.

It looks closely at the guilt and choices of people on the war's margins.

A near-future novel in which startup culture, virtual reality, and family life begin to collapse into one another.

Virtual reality and family reality become increasingly hard to separate.

A postwar French novel about a literary hoax devised by two 13-year-old girls, probing invention, truth, and the urge to tell stories.

Is truth outside story, or does story create truth?

A linked story collection about a Jamaican family in America, exploring immigrant experience, identity, poverty, and family tension.

The survival strategies of an immigrant family emerge between pain and humor.

A debut novel about unrequited love, jazz, and the women orbiting a trumpet player as they claim their own voices.

Around love and music, the women discover how to speak for themselves.

A novel spanning London, Panama, France, Jamaica, and Florida to trace the legacy of colonialism in the lives of Jamaican women.

Across many places, the reverberations of colonialism keep sounding.

An eerie debut collection that builds eight strange worlds where desire, transformation, and decay coexist.

In the midst of decay, desire and magic quietly sprout.

A novel about family, memory, and identity that uses humor and melancholy to explore migration, language, and the relationship between self and others.

A novel about family, memory, and identity that uses humor a…

A family novel about three generations of a Muslim Indian family confronting estrangement, reunion, and the pressures of love and faith.

A family novel about three generations of a Muslim Indian fa…

A novel about the kidnapping and aftermath faced by three young women, using fragments and documents to probe trauma, memory, and community indifference.

A novel about the kidnapping and aftermath faced by three young women.

A novel about a fictional African village confronting an outside extraction company, tracing environmental destruction, power, and generational conflict.

A village stands up to extraction and the damage it leaves behind.

A fable-like novel in which a former president recalls imprisonment, a talking frog, and the politics of dignity and hope.

Imprisonment and a talking frog become an allegory of politics and hope.

A debut short-story collection about Black women, desire, faith, and community, tracing family and generational conflict with candor and tenderness.

A debut short-story collection about Black women, desire, fa…

A novel about a Korean American man whose sense of self begins to slip, using disappearance and doubles to ask what it means to exist and be seen.

A novel about a Korean American man whose sense of self begi…

A novel about friendship, violence, and class at a Southern California high school, where two outsiders test the limits of loyalty and harm.

A novel about friendship, violence, and class at a Southern …

A novel in which the lives of three women intersect through memory research, power, desire, and the long aftermath of abuse.

A novel in which the lives of three women intersect through …

A short-story collection set in the Ozarks, following a wide cast of characters and finding quiet moral pressure in ordinary life.

A short-story collection set in the Ozarks, following a wide…

Set in a small Midwestern town in the United States, the novel traces the slowly intersecting emotions and choices of several characters. Starting from a teacher's perspective, it carefully weaves together affection, loss, secrets, and change hidden inside everyday life until the links between people come gradually into view.

It follows, piece by piece, the hidden map of feeling inside a small town.

After her father's death, Zebra, a narrator shaped by exile, retraces a Mediterranean route carrying her family history and a library of literary references. The novel explores loss, movement, and self-invention in a sharp, comic, book-saturated voice.

A daughter of exile searches for a place in the world by reading it.

Reyna, a young mother, and the people around her are drawn into a chain of choices that unexpectedly connect across time and place. The novel is built as a linked series of stories that gradually widens into a larger human tapestry.

Separate moments quietly connect, revealing the unexpected chain reaction of ordinary lives.

A novel about a Cameroonian immigrant couple in New York confronting the American Dream during the financial crisis.

In a city of opportunity and uncertainty, a family's dream is tested from all sides.

A novel set against a prison-like farm and a collapsing family, tracing how exploitation and violence erode personal dignity. Multiple narrators intersect in a story that combines pain with an unsettling, dark wit.

A harrowing, unsettling novel about exploitation and family breakdown.

The novel follows Zou Lei and Skinner through New York’s margins as they try to survive work, homelessness, and the scars of war.

A stark love story set among immigrants, war veterans, and the urban margins of New York.

Rosemary grows up within a family shaped by a vanished sister and a chimpanzee who was treated as part of the household, then looks back on silence, loss, and the cost of a scientific experiment.

A seemingly ordinary family secret gradually gives the novel its haunting emotional center.

A story collection that captures urban loneliness, ethical conflict, and the subtle distortions of conversation and relationships.

A collection of stories and poems that mixes humor and pain to portray Native American life, family, and cultural identity.

Set in New York after 9/11, Netherland follows an immigrant’s loneliness and search for belonging through cricket and friendship. It is a first-person story of urban loss, hope, and personal renewal told with delicate precision.

In post-9/11 New York, the novel traces an immigrant’s loneliness and renewal.

A novel told through three women who knew a celebrated painter, exploring the gap between private life and public image, fame, memory, and truth.

A spare novel that follows a man's recollections of aging, illness, regret, and death to draw out a broader sense of loss and forgiveness.

A historical epic about Sherman's march through the American South, blending fact and fiction to examine wartime violence and the making of a new social order.

A historical novel narrated by a Chinese prisoner of war in the Korean War, tracing captivity, return, and the erosion and recovery of dignity.

A short-story collection set in the Pacific theater of World War II, tracing how war reshapes ethics and memory through multiple lives and viewpoints.

A WWII Pacific stories collection that follows the shadow of war across several lives.

Bel Canto is set in a South American mansion seized in a hostage crisis, where opera singers and guests develop unexpected bonds of empathy and human connection while confined together. Beauty, violence, and cross-cultural exchange unfold in a quiet and intimate way.

Music and empathy bind people together inside a hostage crisis.

The Human Stain centers on a university professor whose hidden origins and past are exposed, unleashing scandal and isolation. Through the gaze of academia and the media, prejudice, responsibility, and the possibility of forgiveness, it interrogates American morality and hypocrisy.

When secrets surface, the ethics of the individual and society begin to crack.

Set in provincial China, Waiting follows a man who spends years waiting and uses that endurance to portray love, sacrifice, and the coldness of bureaucracy. It sharply dramatizes the clash between private desire and institutional constraint.

Waiting itself becomes a way of life.

The novel parallels three women's lives over a single day while drawing Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway into the present. In quiet domestic spaces, the weight of choice and loss gradually emerges.

Three lives resonate quietly within the span of a single day.

The Bear Comes Home is an unusual novel with a saxophone-playing bear as its protagonist. It blends a love of jazz and art with questions of self-formation and the boundary between wildness and civilization in a humorous, philosophical voice.

A saxophone-playing bear searches for where it belongs.

Women in Their Beds is a short-story collection that writes women’s solitude, secrets, and old wounds in a quiet, restrained style. Through small events and accumulating memory, it reveals both human fragility and strength.

A quiet collection that gathers up women’s solitude and secrets.

Richard Ford’s Independence Day won the award. Through middle-aged Frank Bascombe, it explores family, loss, and the instability of ordinary life.

A novel of middle age, family, and emotional drift.

A substantial novel set on a Washington island where a murder trial intersects with wartime memory and the pain of racial prejudice.

Outside the snowbound courtroom, old wounds are judged in silence.

Operation Shylock is a metafictional novel with a protagonist who resembles the author himself. Set in Israel, it incisively questions imitation and authenticity, identity, and the instability of Jewish belonging.

A writer-like protagonist unsettles the boundary between truth and fiction.

Postcards is a novel-like work set in northern America that quietly portrays disappearance, loss, and memory rooted in the land. Through shifting viewpoints and time frames, it interweaves regional history and private feeling.

Disappearance and loss awaken the memory of place.

Mao II centers on an isolated writer and sharply interrogates crowds, terrorism, and the role of the media. It depicts the interaction between individual creation and mass political force, exposing the isolation and fear of modern life.

An isolated writer confronts an age of crowds and violence.

Set against a fire in Philadelphia and its aftermath, Philadelphia Fire carefully depicts frayed family bonds and the lingering force of memory. It layers questions of race, violence, and the relationship between the individual and the community.

From the aftermath of fire, the pain of family and city comes into view.

A coming-of-age novel about Billy, a boy immersed in the gangster world of the 1930s. Through the criminal underworld around real-life gangsters, it depicts loyalty, betrayal, power, and a vivid historical milieu.

A boy grows up inside the gangster world.

A short-story collection centered on aging, loss, love, and regret. With a spare, lyrical style, it captures daily moments and quietly illuminates the fine-grained emotions beneath them.

A lyrical collection that traces aging and loss.

An expansive novel of New England history and the secrets hidden inside a family. Told across generations, it circles around land and memory, revealing a deeper layer of America through a voice shaped by humor and shadow.

A multigenerational journey through a New England family history.

A novel about war and the life that follows it. Focusing on returned soldiers and former servicemen, it probes isolation, trauma, and the friction between private wounds and society.

A story of the isolation and damage left after war.

A short-story collection set in the South and the Midwest. Through small incidents and frayed relationships, it captures the subtle movements of its characters’ inner lives and the delicate turning points of their lives.

From the frayed edges of daily life, inner lives quietly emerge.

A novella that uses thefts in a barracks on the eve of the Vietnam War to explore the isolation, jealousy, and difficult bonds among young soldiers.

The air in the narrow barracks changes slowly once the thefts begin.

A cycle of stories set in Pittsburgh’s Black community of Homewood. Through disappearance and return, the book explores urban and communal memory, personal identity, and the links between social history and private lives.

Community memory gradually illuminates individual lives.

Toby Olson's Seaview is a novel that crosses a devastated America while tracing relations shaped by rage, love, and survival.

The journey through a ruined country becomes a test of human bonds.

A university professor investigates his father’s death and his family’s past, uncovering the memory of slavery and a history of violence embedded in the region. A personal quest becomes entangled with national memory, probing race and inherited trauma.

Beyond a father’s death, the memories of family and place emerge.

An experimental postwar novel about memory and identity in Germany. Through fragmented narration and multiple viewpoints, it explores family history, national wounds, and the rift and reconciliation between language and culture.

A fragmented novel tracing the scars of postwar Germany.