These books made the longlist for the 2026 National Book Awards

Looking to shake up your TBR list? Consider these literary award nominees.

The National Book Foundation just announced the long list for its 2026 National Book Awards and there is tons of reading inspo here, from nonfiction to poetry and from fiction to young adult reads.

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The Finalists in all five categories will be revealed on Tuesday, October 6, and winners will be announced live at the 77th National Book Awards Ceremony on Wednesday, November 18. (You can livestream the ceremony by registering to watch.)

Now, onto the longlists in three of the five categories. (You can see this year's poetry nominees and translated literature here.)

Longlist for the 2026 National Book Award for Fiction

This category features stories about memory and grief after violence, connection between humans (and non-humans), parents, children and inheritance and more.

• Paradiso 17 by Hannah Lillith Assadi: A man exiled from Palestine as a child in 1948 recounts his life from his deathbed, having spent decades searching for home across Kuwait, Italy and the U.S.
• Red Ants by Kimberly Blaeser: A debut collection of contemporary Anishinaabe stories blending horror, humor, and the supernatural to explore displacement, technology and life on and off the reservation.
• Dèy by Edwidge Danticat: A Haitian American real estate agent in Miami hides the truth from her family after surviving a mass shooting, reckoning with violence and mourning across her life in Haiti and the U.S.
• Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You by Julián Delgado Lopera: In 1990s Bogotá, a grieving father and his lonely teenage daughter learn to live together as she digs into her parents' hidden past and Colombia's queer underground.
• Python’s Kiss by Louise Erdrich: A story collection with a sprawling cast (a girl and her guard dog, a tribal newsletter editor, a Burmese python, a Venetian vampire) that meditates on the ties linking people, animals, and land across life and afterlife.
• The Disappearers by Marlon James: Set in 1988 Kingston, a queer epic tracing the aftermath of a homophobic mob attack on a group of Black and mixed-race gay men, told by multiple narrators against the backdrop of the early AIDS epidemic.
• Beginning Middle End by Valeria Luiselli: A mother and daughter road-trip to Sicily amid the mother's divorce, confronting a grandmother's dementia and a possibly cursed family artifact across four generations.
• Passengers by Alexander Maksik: A father and his adult daughter, stranded together by repeated flight delays, are forced to confront a lifetime of strained love and old wounds.
• The Renovation by Kenan Orhan: A debut novel about a woman who migrates from Istanbul to Italy to care for her dying father and anxious husband, only to discover her bathroom has become a Turkish prison cell.
• Mad Eden by Morgan Thomas: A trans healthcare worker recently diagnosed with autism and her partner live in rural Florida in a debut novel that mixes her story with an online fantasy tale, searching for joy in a hostile world.

Longlist for the 2026 National Book Award for Nonfiction

These nominees tell stories about language, art, and music as tools of power, parenthood and caregiving in an unstable world, violence and dehumanization within larger systems and more. 

• Seasons of Fury: Four Families and the Rise of Islamophobia in America by Rozina Ali: Follows four families over eight decades to show how the War on Terror and post-9/11 surveillance were built on a longer history of anti-Muslim policy and sentiment.
• The Midnight Special: The Secret Prison History of American Music by Colin Asher: Profiles five 20th-century musicians and the albums they made in prison, using biography and musical analysis to indict the racism running through both the justice system and the record industry.
• Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground by Zayd Ayers Dohrn: A memoir/reporting hybrid by the son of Weather Underground founders, drawing on interviews and declassified FBI files to explore radical resistance and its personal costs.
• Huna: A Memoir of Revolution, Prison, and Becoming by Abdelrahman ElGendy: A memoir of a teenage activist arrested with his father during Egypt's post-revolution crackdown, recounting six years in prison amid bureaucracy and corruption.
• Let the Poets Govern: A Declaration of Freedom by Camonghne Felix: Part memoir, part literary and political criticism, tracing her coming-of-age in New York and the Black radical literary tradition, arguing that language can help build new forms of governance.
• The War Within a War: The Black Struggle in Vietnam and at Home by Wil Haygood: Chronicles Black soldiers and other Black Americans during the Vietnam era, linking the disproportionate draft of Black troops to the civil rights movement.
• Mother Tongue by Sara Nović: A memoir about growing up hard of hearing and finding community in Deaf culture, woven with her experience raising a deaf adopted son and a hearing biological son.
• Spawning Season: An Experiment in Queer Parenthood by Joseph Osmundson: A queer microbiologist becomes the father and co-parent for his best friend's family, blending memoir and science writing on building family beyond biology amid climate and political upheaval.
• The Evolution of Fire: Essays on Crisis and Becoming by Angela Pelster: Essays on adapting through personal crisis (divorce, single-parent homelessness) and planetary instability, while staying open to beauty and possibility.
• A Dead White: An Argument Against White Paint by Wendy S. Walters: A work of criticism examining white paint as a supposedly "neutral" default in art, architecture, and daily life and what that choice reveals about cultural psychology.

Longlist for the 2026 National Book Award for Young People's Literature

This category spans themes from bridging past, present, and future to hobbies that open up the world to their protagonists.

• The Free Verse Society by Delali Adjoa: Two teens—one a mother who placed her baby for adoption, the other an athlete grieving his father and worried about his mother's health—clash and connect as new members of a school poetry club.
• Holloway by Elana K. Arnold: A neurodivergent Jewish teen travels to Paris in 2021 to bury her vaccine-skeptic mother, then finds herself pulled back to 1946, forcing her to work through grief, healing, and generational trauma.
• The Celestial Seas by T. A. Chan: The lone survivor of a destroyed spaceship builds a found family with a ragtag interstellar crew while chasing vengeance against a legendary sentient spacecraft.
• When Tomorrow Burns by Tae Keller: Three middle schoolers search for a book of prophecies as wildfire smoke chokes their Seattle hometown, testing and ultimately affirming their friendship.
• That Which Feeds Us: A Hawaiian Gothic by Keala Kendall: A Native Hawaiian teen searches for her missing twin sister at a secluded resort in this supernatural thriller that weaves Indigenous folklore into a critique of colonization's lasting damage.
• The Fight of Our Lives: AIDS in America by David Levithan and Gabriel Duckels: A nonfiction account of the AIDS crisis for young readers, built from interviews, poetry, essays, speeches and art, highlighting the role youth activism played in driving change.
• The Moon Without Stars by Chanel Miller: Two best friends make zines on topics like periods and queerness; when one zine boosts a girl's popularity, she has to decide what she's willing to give up to fit in.
• Clothes to Make You Smile: Patrick Kelly Designs His Dreams by Eric Darnell Pritchard, Shannon Wright: A picture-book biography of Black fashion designer Patrick Kelly, who found his calling sewing clothes for people who, like him, didn't quite fit in.
• Shook by Julian Randall: A 12-year-old basketball hopeful fractures his ankle and starts therapy, learning to manage anxiety and rebuild his sense of self off the court.
• Life on the Moon by Matthew Swanson, Robbi Behr: A boy sent to live on humanity's first moon colony questions its strange rules after his father disappears on a mission.