PEN/Hemingway Awards

"[A novel] about three women--transgender and cisgender--whose lives collide after an unexpected pregnancy forces them to confront their deepest desires around gender, motherhood, and sex..."-- Reese had what previous generations of trans women could only dream of; the only thing missing was a child. Then her girlfriend, Amy, detransitioned and became Ames, and everything fell apart. Ames thought detransitioning to live as a man would make life easier,...

Feeling adrift after ending a relationship, Julius, a young Nigerian doctor living in New York, takes long walks through the city while listening to the stories of fellow immigrants until a shattering truth is revealed.

Half a century after the marriage of her Polish grandparents is marred by World War II and a painful tragedy, Beata recreates their journey to Kraków, where she encounters a youth culture torn between the city's past and future.

The remaining employees at an office affected by a business downturn spend their time enjoying secret romances, elaborate pranks, and frequent coffee breaks, while trying to make sense of their only remaining "work," a mysterious pro-bono ad campaign.

"Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, this stunning debut collection unerring charts the emotional journeys of characters seeking love beyond the barriers of nations and generations. In stories that travel from India to America and back again, Lahiri speaks with universal eloquence to everyone who has ever felt like a foreigner."--Provided by publisher.

Set adrift when her grandfather passes away, Cale takes a waitressing job and reconnects with Penny, a former classmate who runs side-hustles to finance her dreams, but when Penny vanishes, Cale sets off on a dangerous quest across the desert to find her.

"A novel about a young Chinese woman whose graduate studies in chemistry go off track and lead her to discover the truths about her goals and desires"-- Three years into her graduate studies at a demanding Boston university, our unnamed narrator finds her one-time love for chemistry is more hypothesis than reality. Tormented by her failed research, there's another, nonscientific question looming: the marriage proposal from a fellow scientist, whose...

Dreaming of life in the city while caring for her alcoholic father and working in a 1960s boys' prison, a disturbed young woman is manipulated into committing a psychologically charged crime during the holiday season.

This unflinching and powerful novel tells the "deeply felt and fiercely written" story of a young girl's journey out of Zimbabwe to America (New York Times Book Review).
Darling is only ten years old, and yet she must navigate a fragile and violent world. In Zimbabwe, Darling and her friends steal guavas, try to get the baby out of young Chipo's belly, and grasp at memories of Before. Before their homes were destroyed...