National Book Awards 2024

National Book Award Winners and Finalists 2024. A graphic of someone reading with the YPL and National Book Foundation logos.

The National Book Awards were established in 1950 “to celebrate the best writing in the United States.” Since 1989, the National Book Awards have been overseen by the National Book Foundation, a nonprofit organization that seeks to “to celebrate the best literature published in the United States, expand its audience, and ensure that books have a prominent place in our culture.”

Each year, the National Book Awards honors titles in several categories: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translated literature, and young people’s literature. Five titles are selected in each category and one winner is selected while the other four are finalists.

Fiction

James by Percival Everett

Available in Large Print and digitally Libby

Excerpt from Publisher Description: When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

Fiction Finalist Titles: 

Nonfiction

Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling by Jason De Leon

Available digitally on Libby

Excerpt from Publisher Description: Political instability, poverty, climate change, and the insatiable appetite for cheap labor 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 recognized anthropologist and expert Jason De León embedded with a group of smugglers moving migrants across Mexico over the course of seven years.

Nonfiction Finalist Titles:

Poetry

Something about Living by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

Available digitally on Libby

Excerpt from Publisher Description: It's nearly impossible to write poetry that holds the human desire for joy and the insistent agitations of protest at the same time, but Lena Khalaf Tuffaha's gorgeous and wide-ranging new collection Something About Living does just that. Her poems interweave Palestine's historic suffering, the challenges of living in this world full of violence and ill will, and the gentle delights we embrace to survive that violence. Khalaf Tuffaha's elegant poems sing the fractured songs of Diaspora while remaining clear-eyed to the cause of the fracturing: the multinational hubris of colonialism and greed.

Poetry Finalists:

Translated Literature

Taiwan Travelogue by Yang Shuang-zi

Available digitally on Libby

Excerpt from Publisher Description: 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--who is younger even than she is, and who shares the characters of her name--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. It's only after a heartbreaking separation that Chizuko begins to grasp what the "something" is.

Translated Literature Finalists:

Young People’s Literature

Kareem Between by Shifa Saltagi Safadi

Available digitally on Libby

Excerpt from Publisher Description: 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 volun told 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.

Young People’s Literature Finalists: 

Alison Robles is a Part-Time Junior Clerk at the Crestwood Library. She is an avid reader with a passion for YA lit, historical fiction and fantasy. A Yonkers native, she is currently pursuing an MS in Information and Library Science from the University at Buffalo.
 

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