A Night with the NATIONAL BOOK FOUNDATION’S 5 UNDER 35

Angela Flournoy is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she received a Dean’s Fellowship, and the University of Southern California. She has taught writing at the University of Iowa and Trinity Washington University and has worked for the Washington, DC Public Library. She was raised in Southern California by a mother from Los Angeles and a father from Detroit. The Turner House, set in Detroit, is her first novel. ABOUT THE BOOK A powerful, timely debut, The Turner House marks a major new contribution to the story of the American family. The Turners have lived on Yarrow Street for over fifty years. Their house has seen thirteen children grown and gone--and some returned; it has seen the arrival of grandchildren, the fall of Detroit's East Side, and the loss of a father. The house still stands despite abandoned lots, an embattled city, and the inevitable shift outward to the suburbs. But now, as ailing matriarch Viola finds herself forced to leave her home and move in with her eldest son, the family discovers that the house is worth just a tenth of its mortgage. The Turner children are called home to decide its fate and to reckon with how each of their pasts haunts--and shapes--their family's future. Already praised by Ayana Mathis as "utterly moving" and "un-putdownable," The Turner House brings us a colorful, complicated brood full of love and pride, sacrifice and unlikely inheritances. It's a striking examination of the price we pay for our dreams and futures, and the ways in which our families bring us home.

Colin Barrett was born in 1982 and grew up in County Mayo, Ireland. In 2009 he was awarded the Penguin Ireland Prize. Young Skins won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the Guardian First Book Award, and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. His stories have appeared in Stinging Fly magazine, A Public Space, Five Dials, and The New Yorker. Young Skins is his first book. ABOUT THE BOOK A recovering addict drifts closer to the oblivion he’d hoped to avoid by returning to his home town; two estranged friends hide themselves away in a darkened pub, reluctant to attend the funeral of the woman they both loved; a bouncer who cannot envisage a world beyond the walls of the small town nightclub his life revolves around. Set for the most part in the fictional County Mayo town of Glanbeigh, Colin Barrett’s stories deftly explore the wayward lives and loves of young men and women in contemporary post-boom Ireland. Young Skins offers an utterly unique reading experience and marks the appearance of an arresting and innovative new voice in Irish writing.  

Megan Kruse grew up in the rural Pacific Northwest. She studied creative writing at Oberlin College and earned her MFA at the University of Montana. Her work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies, and she recently completed residencies at the Kimmel-Harding-Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska and the New York Mills Regional Cultural Center in Minnesota. She is the 2015-2016 Visiting Writer-in-Residence at Eastern Oregon University’s Low-Residency MFA program. She currently lives in Seattle. Call Me Home is her first novel. ABOUT THE BOOK Call Me Home has an epic scope in the tradition of Louise Erdrich’s The Plague of Doves or Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping and braids the stories of a family in three distinct voices: Amy, who leaves her Texas home at 19 to start a new life with a man she barely knows, and her two children, Jackson and Lydia, who are rocked by their parents’ abusive relationship. When Amy is forced to bargain for the safety of one child over the other, she must retrace the steps in the life she has chosen. Jackson, 18 and made visible by his sexuality, leaves home and eventually finds work on a construction crew in the Idaho mountains, where he begins a potentially ruinous affair with Don, the married foreman of his crew. Lydia, his 12-year-old sister, returns with her mother to Texas, struggling to understand what she perceives to be her mother’s selfishness. At its heart, this is a novel about family, our choices and how we come to live with them, what it means to be queer in the rural West, and the changing idea of home.

Tracy O'Neill lives in Brooklyn. In 2012, she was awarded a NYC Emerging Writers Fellowship by the Center for Fiction. Her novel The Hopeful was published in June 2015, and her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Guernica, Granta, The Literarian, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and Promethean. You can read her nonfiction in The Atlantic, Grantland, Bookforum, Rolling Stone, and newyorker.com. She currently teaches at the Fashion Institute of Technology and the City College of New York. ABOUT THE BOOK A figure skating prodigy, sixteen-year old Alivopro Doyle is one of a few "hopefuls" racing against nature's clock to try and jump and spin their way into the Olympics. But when a disastrous fall fractures two vertebrae, leaving Ali addicted to painkillers and ultimately institutionalized, it's not just her dreams of glory that get torn asunder, but the very fabric that holds her fragile family together.

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is the author of Fra Keeler. She is the recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award, a MacDowell Fellowship, and a Fulbright Fellowship to Catalonia, Spain. She has lived in Italy, Spain, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, and now resides in the USA. She teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame and splits her time between South Bend, Indiana and Florence, Italy. ABOUT THE BOOK A man purchases a house, the house of Fra Keeler, moves in, and begins investigating the circumstances of the latter's death. Yet the investigation quickly turns inward, and the reality it seeks to unravel seems only to grow more strange, as the narrator pursues not leads but lines of thought, most often to hideous conclusions.

Jonny Diamond is the founding editor of The L Magazine and Brooklyn Magazine, and is currently the editor-in-chief of Literary Hub. He lives in Hudson, NY, with his wife and young son, and too many animals.