Two of the summer’s most talked about novels, Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half and Megha Majumdar’s A Burning , are on the National Book Awards fiction longlist. Judges also nominated the story collection If I Had Two Wings , by Randall Kenan, who died in August 2020.
Friday’s list concludes a week during which the National Book Foundation, which presents the awards, announced nominees for translation, poetry, young people’s literature and non-fiction. On October 6, the lists will be narrowed from 10 to 5 books in each category. Winners will be announced on November 18, with honourary medals being awarded to novelist Walter Mosley and to the late Simon & Schuster CEO Carolyn Reidy, whose husband will accept on her behalf.
Many of the fiction nominees are younger authors, under age 50, with a handful or less of published works.
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Two books are debut novels: The Burning , the story of a woman in India who is accused of terrorism, and Douglas Stuart’s’ Shuggie Bain , a family saga set in Glasgow.
Others on the fiction list include Rumaan Alam’s’ Leave the World Behind , Christopher Beha’s The Index of Self-Destructive Acts , Lydia Millet’s’ A Children’s Bible and Deesha Philyaw’s The Secret Lives of Church Ladies . Also nominated were Vanessa Veselka’s The Great Offshore Grounds and Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown . Some off the year’s most anticipated works did not make the list, including Marilynne Robinson’s Jack , Ayad Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies and Sigrid Nunez’s What You Are Going Through , her first novel since winning the National Book Award two years ago for The Friend .
