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Find The New Yorker’s announcement here.
The National Book Foundation today announced the Longlist for the 2025 National Book Award for Fiction with The New Yorker. The Finalists in all five categories will be revealed on Tuesday, October 7 with the New York Times; Winners will be announced live at the 76th National Book Awards Ceremony & Benefit Dinner on Wednesday, November 19, 2025.
The 2025 Fiction Longlist features two debut novels and one story collection among the ten titles. Eight authors on this year’s Fiction Longlist have been previously honored by the National Book Foundation: Joy Williams was a Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction in 1974 for State of Grace; Rabih Alameddine was a Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction in 2014 for An Unnecessary Woman; Susan Choi was the Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction in 2019 for Trust Exercise; Angela Flournoy was a Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction in 2015 for The Turner House, as well as a 2015 5 Under 35 honoree; Jonas Hassen Khemiri was a Finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2020 for The Family Clause, translated from the Swedish by Alice Menzies; Megha Majumdar was a Longlister for the National Book Award for Fiction in 2020 for A Burning; Karen Russell was a 2009 5 Under 35 honoree; and Bryan Washington was a 2019 5 Under 35 honoree.
This year’s Fiction Longlisters have received fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Hawthornden Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Public Library. The authors have been recognized by numerous other awards and honors, including the American Library Association’s Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, the Asian American Literary Award, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Kirkus Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, the Médicis Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize. Their writing has been featured in Esquire, GQ, the Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, the New York Times, The Paris Review, TIME Magazine, and elsewhere.
Two of this year’s titles grapple with parental loss, coming of age, and the push and pull of memory and history. Spanning decades, continents, and continuously shifting between points of view, Flashlight follows the life of a woman whose father mysteriously disappeared one night by the sea when she was ten years old. That catastrophe echoes through Louisa’s adulthood in Susan Choi’s latest novel, which examines geopolitics and the family secrets that can irrevocably change our lives. Fatherhood reverberates in multigenerational timelines in Kevin Moffett’s debut novel Only Son when a man discovers his late father’s travel journal 25 years after his death. The narrator decides to take his own son on a road trip to retrace his father’s steps, in an intimate journey that transforms his relationships with his son, the memory of his father, and his own self-identity.
Continuing the theme of healing from parental trauma, two 2025 Longlisters explore mother-son relationships. Rabih Alameddine’s The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) tells the tale of a Lebanese family across six decades—from the Lebanese Civil War to the COVID-19 pandemic—with humor and heartbreak. A gay 63-year-old high school philosophy teacher who shares an apartment with his prying mother, Raja enthusiastically accepts when he is offered a fully-funded writing fellowship in the US, only to later realize that the opportunity would force him to confront the very secrets he thought he’d left behind. In Tokyo, Palaver’s unnamed narrator works as an English tutor and spends the evenings with his friends at their neighborhood’s gay bar. Estranged from his family in Texas, he is surprised to find his mother on his doorstep weeks before Christmas. Together again, mother and son share meals and conversations spanning decades and borders—from Houston to Jamaica to Japan—as they struggle to understand and ultimately forgive one another in Bryan Washington’s latest novel.
2025 Fiction Longlisters consider human-driven environmental destruction through folklore, dystopia, and historical events. Across the 11 stories in The Pelican Child, readers meet twin-sister heiresses compelled to commit a violent crime, the ghost of a man intent on visiting the childhood home of the late Susan Sontag, and the “pelican child” who lives with the Slavic folklore character Baba Iaga. Joy Williams’s story collection presents us with a cast of characters determined to make sense of the people and world around them, while simultaneously wreaking real and imagined harm. In A Guardian and a Thief, a family has secured coveted “climate visas” to the United States, but on the day of their flight, they wake to discover their passports have been stolen. Set over the course of one week in a near-future Kolkata devastated by food insecurity and climate change, Megha Majumdar’s novel tells the story of two families, asking just how far we might be willing to go to protect those we love.
Karen Russell’s The Antidote is set in a Dust Bowl–era fictional Nebraska town on the brink of collapse—bracing against the forces of the Great Depression, weather catastrophes, and the community’s violent histories with Indigenous people and the land. A “prairie witch” offers the town’s residents a solution to their worries by safeguarding their darkest secrets in her own body, but a question remains: how long can we avoid the truths of our past and of harm caused? In North Sun: Or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther, the crew of the Esther sets out in 1878 with two purported goals: to embark on a whaling journey in the waning days of the industry, and to find a ship and its captain before they’re lost to the sea. This seafaring saga by Ethan Rutherford follows a ragtag crew led by Arnold Lovejoy. As the true purpose of their journey comes to light, the cast of characters must scrutinize their own environmental destruction, contend with the unnecessary deaths of humans and animals alike, and consider the lives they’ve left behind on solid land.
In two Longlisted novels, timelines span decades as characters grow together—and apart—through interconnected storylines. The Wilderness follows a group of five millennial Black women over the course of their 20-year friendship. Angela Flournoy captures the quintet from young adulthood to midlife as they navigate personal loss, seek community in their quickly gentrifying cities, and attempt to balance careers, romantic relationships, and motherhood alongside their friendship. Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s family epic spans half a century and revolves around the lives of the Mikkola sisters, the daughters of a Tunisian carpet seller and a Swedish father who abandoned them when they were young. Their story is narrated from afar by Jonas, the son of a Swedish mother and a Tunisian father, who helps the siblings break free of the curse that has threatened them from birth in The Sisters.
Publishers submitted a total of 434 books for the 2025 National Book Award for Fiction. The judges for Fiction are Rumaan Alam (Chair), Debra Magpie Earling, Attica Locke, Elizabeth McCracken, and Cody Morrison. Judges’ decisions are made independently of the National Book Foundation staff and Board of Directors, and deliberations are strictly confidential. For more information about the 76th National Book Awards Ceremony & Benefit Dinner and to register for the livestream, please visit nationalbook.org/awards.
Rabih Alameddine, The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother)
Grove Press / Grove Atlantic
Susan Choi, Flashlight
Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Macmillan Publishers
Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness
Mariner Books / HarperCollins Publishers
Jonas Hassen Khemiri, The Sisters
Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Macmillan Publishers
Megha Majumdar, A Guardian and a Thief
Knopf / Penguin Random House
Kevin Moffett, Only Son
McSweeney’s
Karen Russell, The Antidote
Knopf / Penguin Random House
Ethan Rutherford, North Sun: Or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther
A Strange Object / Deep Vellum Publishing
Bryan Washington, Palaver
Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Macmillan Publishers
Joy Williams, The Pelican Child
Knopf / Penguin Random House
