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2019 National Book Award Finalists: Fiction
The winning novel, plus the other top contenders for the prestigious award.
Published on November 21, 2019
Trust Exercise: A Novel
Susan Choi“Trust Exercise” won the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction, with judges praising author Susan Choi for “blend[ing] the intellectual rigor of post-modern technique with a story that is timely, mesmerizing, and, in the end, unsettling.” The novel upends conventional storylines in a charged exploration of deception when two students fall in love at a competitive performing arts high school in the 1980s.
Death is Hard Work: A Novel
Khaled Khalifa“A family is forced to reunite to bury their father amid the wreckage of Syria’s civil war in Khaled Khalifa’s Odyssean black comedy ‘Death Is Hard Work,’ which was translated from the Arabic by Leri Price,” according to the National Book Foundation’s announcement of the compelling novel’s nomination for the Translated Literature award.