Winner
Hisham Matar for The Return: Fathers, Sons, and the Land in Between (Penguin Random House)
From the Judges’ Citation
Hisham Matar’s The Return is a magnificent book about love and family, about crushing loss and the destruction of hope inflicted by brutal political tyranny. The narrative of Matar’s hunt for information about his father, who was “disappeared” in Qaddafi’s Libya, is told with clarity and grace and with a poet’s sensibility. It is both an intimate study of emotion and a precisely reported, broader look at the horror of dictatorships and the devastation they can wreak on families and communities. Although the narrative jumps back and forth through time, there are no tricks or gimmicks in this book; it is an honest and intense portrait of filial yearning—the pivot on which the story turns and turns. Exquisitely written and profoundly felt, The Return is essential reading that breaks our hearts while piercing us with light.
Finalists
Known and Strange Things
Teju Cole
Random House
Amazon | Indie Bound | Excerpt
Olio
Tyehimba Jess
Wave Books
Amazon | Indie Bound | Excerpt
The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between
Hisham Matar
Random House
Amazon | Indie Bound | Excerpt
Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right
Jane Mayer
Doubleday/Penguin Random House
Amazon | Indie Bound | Excerpt
The Underground Railroad
Colson Whitehead
Doubleday/Penguin Random House
Amazon | Indie Bound | Excerpt
Judges
Sonali Deraniyagala, Carolyn Forché, Gregory Pardlo, Norman Rush, and Deborah Treisman
Click here for additional information, including submission guidelines, for the award.