Award-Winning Readings: National Book Award Finalists and Winners in Fiction

Elliot Ackerman’s Dark at the Crossing is a contemporary love story set on the Turkish border with Syria. In Daniel Alarcón’s story collection, The King Is Always Above the People, migration, betrayal, family secrets, doomed love, and uncertain futures are transformed into deeply human stories with high stakes. Lisa Ko‘s powerful debut, The Leavers, winner of the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Fiction, follows one young man’s search for his mother, an undocumented Chinese immigrant who disappears when he’s 11 years old. In Min Jin Lee‘s bestselling novel, Pachinko, four generations of a poor Korean immigrant family fight to control their destiny in 20th-century Japan, exiled from a home they never knew. In her collection of short stories, Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women’s lives and the violence visited upon their bodies. Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s A Kind of Freedom explores the legacy of racial disparity in the South through a poignant and redemptive family history. Carol Zoref‘s award-winning first novel, Barren Island, is set a forsaken sand bar, but infused with strange beauty and love. Charmaine Craig’s Miss Burma, based on the lives of the author’s mother and grandparents,  tells the story of modern-day Burma through the eyes of one family struggling to find love, justice, and meaning during a time of war and political repression.

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