2026 Winners

A Guardian and a Thief
Megha Majumdar. 
(Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC)

Desperation permeates Majumdar’s wrenching novel set in a near-future Kolkata besieged by worsening climate crises. Privileged Ma, widowed Dadu, and two-year-old Mishti are spending one last week in their native city before they escape to Michigan when Ma’s purse, filled with priceless documents, is stolen. Majumdar brilliantly blurs right and wrong, ethics and legality. In such frenzied times, who is the guardian and who is the thief can never be clear.

The Unworthy
Agustina Bazterrica. Translated by Sarah Moses. 
(Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC)

Bazterrica’s absorbing feminist literary horror novel stars an unnamed narrator seeking refuge in a twisted hierarchical commune in an unnamed city as she documents her deplorable situation in an illicit diary. Bazterrica is in her element dramatizing the violent and atrocious acts that the residents of the community are subjected to and, in turn, inflict on each other. Satirical, incisive and convincing horror that skewers religious fervor and blind obedience.

We Do Not Part
Han Kang. Translated by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris. 
(Hogarth, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC)

Writer Kyungha is plagued by nightmares after publishing a book “about the massacre in G—.”  The nightmares’ intensifying vividity inspires her to contact a close friend, a photographer and documentary filmmaker, about the possibility of collaborating on a film adaptation of these indelible images. Han brilliantly examines the breadth of human relationships, from unconditional mother-child bonds to timeless friendship to heinous inhumanity.

Baldwin, Styron, and Me
Mélikah Abdelmoumen. Translated by Catherine Khordoc. 
(Biblioasis)

Abdelmoumen explores the literary friendship between James Baldwin and William Styron, “the grandson of a slave and the grandson of a slaveowner,” whose relationship led to Styron’s Pulitzer Prize–winning historical novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner. A fascinating meditation on how disparate writers can stimulate each others’ creativity and on the pitfalls of cross-cultural art.

There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America 
Brian Goldstone. 
(Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC)

The common assumption that unhoused Americans are unemployed (and unemployable) is challenged in journalist Goldstone’s heartbreaking book. Doing a deep dive into the history and circumstances of several family units in the Atlanta area who have been plagued by homelessness, despite having jobs, Goldstone reveals the harsh and complex obstacles of daily life for people living on the edges of society.

Things in Nature Merely Grow
Yiyun Li. 
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Only Li can explain what happened. “There is no good way to state these facts . . . My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide.” In this “book for James,” Li faces the shocking reality of her second son’s death by suicide with “radical acceptance” and heartrending honesty.