A Guide to the 2022 National Book Award Finalists

Winner: Fiction

The titular Rabbit Hutch is a low-cost housing complex in Vacca Vale, Indiana, where Blandine shares her apartment with three teenage boys. The story is set over one week in July, culminating in a "bizarre act of violence that finally changes everything."

Finalist, Fiction

Gayl Jones's long-awaited fifth novel is set on the island of Ibiza, where writer Amanda's friend, a sculptor named Catherine, is repeatedly institutionalized for trying to kill her husband. Amanda, Catherine, and Catherine's husband "form a quirky triangle on the white-washed island," the publisher writes, and The Birdcatcher is "a study in Black women’s creative expression, and the intensity of their relationships."

Finalist, Fiction

In Jamil Jan Kochai's short story collection, he centers the voices of contemporary Afghan people—in the diaspora in America and in Afghanistan. The collection grapples "with the ghosts of war and displacement" and is a timely look at the current political landscape.

Finalist, Fiction

Sneha, a young queer Indian immigrant, graduates in a recession, moves to Milwaukee for an entry-level corporate job, and begins to send money to her parents back in India. Yet, trouble quickly arrives. As the publisher writes, All This Could Be Different "is a wise, tender, and riveting group portrait of young people forging love and community amidst struggle, and a moving story of one immigrant’s journey to make her home in the world."

Finalist, Fiction

Winner, Nonfiction

South to America is a journey through the American South through the eyes of Imani Perry, a Black woman and native Alabaman. Isabel Wilkerson describes the story as "an elegant meditation on the complexities of the American South—and thus of America—by an esteemed daughter of the South and one of the great intellectuals of our time. An inspiration."

Finalist, Nonfiction

Meghan O'Rourke explores the rise of chronic illness and autoimmune diseases that afflict millions of Americans. Per the publisher, "Blending lyricism and erudition, candor and empathy, O’Rourke brings together her deep and disparate talents and roles as critic, journalist, poet, teacher, and patient, synthesizing the personal and universal into one monumental project arguing for a seismic shift in our approach to disease."

Finalist, Nonfiction

Simply put, Breathless is the story of SARS-CoV-2 and how scientists developed vaccines to fight it.

Finalist, Nonfiction

Author Ingrid Rojas Contreras tells the story of her family and the violence of Colombia in the 1980s and 1990s. Her mother, a fortune teller, and her grandfather, a renowned curandero (akin to a community healer), taught her about "the secrets." Her memoir is full of magic, violence, and history, and is a powerful feat of storytelling.

Finalist, Nonfiction

His Name Is George Floyd is a sweeping biography of George Floyd, and how his tragic murder brought about a global Black Lives Matter movement. "Since we know George Floyd’s death with tragic clarity, we must know Floyd’s America—and life—with tragic clarity. Essential for our times," Ibram X. Kendi writes of His Name Is George Floyd.

Winner, Poetry

In this collection by John Keene, the poems span decades, featuring new and previously unpublished work. "Many voices that emerge in these poems--from historic Black personalities, both familial and famous, to the poet's friends and lovers in gay bars and bedrooms—form a cast of characters capable of addressing desire, oppression, AIDS, and grief through sorrowful songs that 'we sing as hard as we live,'" the publisher writes of Punks.

Finalist, Poetry

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke writes a love letter to California in the time of climate change in this poem. The book is in part dedicated to California, "our beloved, / once, the world was gleaming, open, we entered / unknowing, believing all we came to / we must deserve, knowing we did not faced / extinction."

Finalist, Poetry

The poems in Balladz are "songs from our era of communal grief and reckoning." The book begins with a section of works on quarantine during the pandemic. Per the publisher, "It is [Sharon] Olds's gift to us that in the richly detailed exposure of her sorrows she can still elegize songbirds, her true kin, and write that heaven comes here in life, not after it."

Finalist, Poetry

In the poems in Best Barbarian, Roger Reeves dives into topics ranging from familial love to climate change to anti-Black racism, with references to Walt Whitman, James Baldwin, Sappho, Dante, among others. He asks: “Who has not been an entryway shuddering in the wind / Of another’s want, a rose nailed to some dark longing and bled?”

Finalist, Poetry

The Rupture Tense begins with poems inspired by the photography of Li Zhensheng, who documented the Cultural Revolution, and ends with an elegy for author Jenny Xie's grandmother, who died by suicide after the Revolution had ended. As the publisher writes, "In polyphonic and formally restless sequences, Jenny Xie cracks open reverberant, vexed experiences of diasporic homecoming, intergenerational memory transfer, state-enforced amnesia, public secrecies, and the psychic fallout of the Chinese Cultural Revolution."

Winner, Translated Literature

This story collection by Samantha Schweblin centers on seven houses. "A person is missing, or a truth, or memory; some rooms are enticing, some unmoored, others empty," the publisher writes. "But in Samanta Schweblin's tense, visionary tales, something always creeps back inside: a ghost, a fight, trespassers, a list of things to do before you die, a child's first encounter with darkness or the fallibility of parents."

Translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell

Finalist, Translated Literature

The final installment of Jon Fosse's series Septology tells the tale of two Norwegian men named Asle: One is an aging painter Asle, who lives alone on the west coast with two friends, another is also a painter, but one who is lonely and alcoholic and lives in the city, Bjørgvin.

Translated from Norwegian by Damion Searls

Finalist, Translated Literature

Renowned Rwandan author Scholastique Mukasonga returns with a searing and satirical look at the clash between Rwandan tradition and missionary forces.

Translated from French by Mark Polizzotti

Finalist, Translated Literature

Set at a Catholic school for elite Ecuadorian girls, Jawbone focuses on two girls, Fernanda and Annelise, who are practically sisters. Yet, as the description reads, "how does Fernanda end up bound on the floor of a deserted cabin, held hostage by one of her teachers and estranged from Annelise?" It's a creepy, horror filled tale about girlhood.

Translated from Spanish by Sarah Booker

Finalist, Translated Literature

Yoko Tawada, who won the National Book Award in 2018, returns with this dystopian novel where Japan has vanished from the face of the earth, and former Japanese citizen Hiruko ends up in Denmark.

Translated from Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani