The 2024 winners of the National Book Awards
The winners of this year's National Book Awards have been announced! Since 1950, the National Book Awards have been celebrating the best writing in America.
Fiction
James by Percival Everett
The Mississippi River, 1861. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a new owner in New Orleans and separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson's Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father who recently returned to town. Thus begins a dangerous and transcendent journey by raft along the Mississippi River, toward the elusive promise of free states and beyond. As James and Huck begin to navigate the treacherous waters, each bend in the river holds the promise of both salvation and demise.
With rumours of a brewing war, James must face the burden he carries: the family he is desperate to protect and the constant lie he must live. And together, the unlikely pair must face the most dangerous odyssey of them all.
Read our staff review here.
Nonfiction
Soldiers and Kings by Jason De León
Political instability, poverty, climate change, and the insatiable appetite for cheap labour all fuel clandestine movement across borders. As those borders harden, the demand for smugglers who aid migrants across them increases every year. Yet the real lives and work of smugglers – or coyotes, or guides, as they are often known by the migrants who hire their services – are only ever reported on from a distance, using tired tropes and stereotypes, often depicted as boogie men and violent warlords. In an effort to better understand this essential yet extralegal billion dollar global industry, internationally recognised anthropologist and expert Jason De Leon embedded with a group of smugglers moving migrants across Mexico over the course of seven years.
Soldiers and Kings is not only a ground-breaking up-close glimpse of a difficult-to-access world, it is a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction.
Poetry
Something about Living by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
Something About Living explores Palestinian life through the lens of American language, revealing a legacy of obfuscation and erasure. What happens when language only permits ongoing disasters to be packaged neatly for consumption and subsequent disposal?
Translated literature
Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zi (translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King)
May 1938. The young novelist Aoyama Chizuko has sailed from her home in Nagasaki, Japan, and arrived in Taiwan. She’s been invited there by the Japanese government ruling the island, though she has no interest in their official banquets or imperialist agenda. Instead, Chizuko longs to experience real island life and to taste as much of its authentic cuisine as her famously monstrous appetite can bear.
Soon a Taiwanese woman is hired as her interpreter and makes her dreams come true. The charming, erudite, meticulous Chizuru arranges Chizuko’s travels all over the Land of the South and also proves to be an exceptional cook. Over scenic train rides and braised pork rice, lively banter and winter melon tea, Chizuko grows infatuated with her companion and intent on drawing her closer. But something causes Chizuru to keep her distance.
This is currently available from the US, but will be available locally mid-February 2025
Young people's literature
Kareem Between by Shifa Saltagi Safadi
Seventh grade begins, and Kareem's already fumbled it. His best friend moved away, he messed up his tryout for the football team, and because of his heritage, he was voluntold to show the new kid – a Syrian refugee with a thick and embarrassing accent – around school. Just when Kareem thinks his middle school life has imploded, the hotshot QB promises to get Kareem another tryout for the squad. There's a catch: to secure that chance, Kareem must do something he knows is wrong.
Then, like a surprise blitz, Kareem's mom returns to Syria to help her family but can't make it back home. If Kareem could throw a penalty flag on the fouls of his school and home life, it would be for unnecessary roughness. Kareem is stuck between. Between countries. Between friends, between football, between parents – and between right and wrong. It's up to him to step up, find his confidence, and navigate the beauty and hope found somewhere in the middle.
Due for local publication on or around 3 December
