Literary Fiction

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1
The Mountains Sing
The Mountains Sing
Que Mai Phan Nguyen
Spanning several decades of Vietnamese history, The Mountains Sing follows the Trần family through famine, political upheaval, land reform, and the Vietnam War. The story centres on grandmother Trần Diệu Lan, who is forced to flee her family farm with her six children during the land reforms of the 1950s. Years later, her young granddaughter Hương grows up in Hanoi as the war tears her family apart and sends her parents and uncles into battle. Through alternating perspectives, the novel reveals the extraordinary hardships endured by successive generations. While Hương tries to understand the world around her, Diệu Lan shares memories of loss, survival, and the choices she made to protect her children. Their relationship becomes a source of strength in a country where families have been divided by political loyalties, violence, and competing visions of the future. Drawing on Vietnamese history, folklore, poetry, and cultural traditions, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai presents a deeply personal perspective on a conflict often portrayed internationally through foreign experiences. The novel explores the lasting consequences of war while celebrating the resilience of ordinary people, the bonds between generations, and the possibility of healing through remembrance and compassion.
Vietnam 2020
2
The Girl with the Louding Voice
The Girl with the Louding Voice
Abi Daré
Fourteen-year-old Adunni dreams of receiving an education, becoming a teacher, and giving her family a better life. Growing up in a poor rural village in Nigeria, she believes that education will give her the power to speak for herself and choose her own future. Her mother calls this her louding voice—the ability to make herself heard in a world that expects girls to remain silent. When Adunni’s father marries her off to a much older man in exchange for a bride price, her dreams of going to school are shattered. After a devastating tragedy, she escapes to Lagos, hoping to find freedom and a new beginning. Instead, she becomes a domestic servant in the household of a wealthy, controlling woman known as Big Madam. There, Adunni encounters exploitation, abuse, and the harsh realities faced by girls whose poverty leaves them vulnerable to others’ power. Despite repeated setbacks, Adunni refuses to abandon her ambition. As she uncovers the truth about another young domestic worker who disappeared before her arrival, she begins to understand that finding her voice means more than fighting for herself—it also means speaking up for girls whose suffering has been ignored. Told in Adunni’s distinctive, expressive voice, the novel combines humour, heartbreak, and hope to examine child marriage, gender inequality, poverty, and the transformative power of education. It is a moving story about a young woman’s determination to reclaim her future and challenge the social structures that seek to silence her.
Nigeria 2020
3
Homeland Elegies
Homeland Elegies
Ayad Akhtar
Homeland Elegies blends fiction, memoir, and social commentary to explore what it means to be Muslim, Pakistani American, and American in a country struggling with questions of race, religion, patriotism, and belonging. The novel follows a fictionalised version of Ayad Akhtar and his relationship with his father, a Pakistani immigrant and devoted admirer of Donald Trump. As father and son navigate their complicated relationship, their personal experiences unfold against the backdrop of post-9/11 America, where Islamophobia, political division, and economic insecurity have reshaped the lives of immigrant communities. Moving between family memories, political reflections, cultural criticism, and encounters with people across different social worlds, Akhtar examines the contradictions of the American Dream. His narrator grapples with the privileges and prejudices of American society, the burden of inherited expectations, and the tension between wanting to belong to a country and feeling rejected by it. Rather than presenting a straightforward autobiographical account, Akhtar deliberately blurs the boundaries between truth and invention. The result is an intimate and provocative portrait of a nation wrestling with its identity, told through the experiences of a family whose personal struggles mirror America’s broader divisions.
United States 2020
4
Transcendent Kingdom
Transcendent Kingdom
Yaa Gyasi
Gifty, a Ghanaian American neuroscience PhD student at Stanford, searches for answers in the science of addiction while struggling to understand the tragedies that have shaped her family. Her brother Nana, once a promising athlete, died after developing an addiction to opioids, and her deeply religious mother has fallen into a debilitating depression. Torn between the evangelical faith of her childhood and the scientific world she inhabits, Gifty investigates the mechanisms of reward and suffering, hoping to uncover why people hurt themselves and those they love. Intimate and quietly devastating, Transcendent Kingdom explores grief, addiction, faith, and the limits of what science can explain about the human heart.
Nigeria 2020
5
How Much of These Hills Is Gold
How Much of These Hills Is Gold
C Pam Zhang
In the final days of the Gold Rush, two Chinese American siblings, Lucy and Sam, find themselves orphaned in a hostile landscape where their very existence challenges the myth of the American West. Carrying their father’s body across a vast, unforgiving terrain, they search for a place to bury him and confront the secrets of their family’s past. Through memories of hunger, displacement, and their parents’ desperate pursuit of belonging, the siblings must decide what it means to inherit a country that refuses to claim them. Lyrical and haunting, C Pam Zhang’s debut reimagines the Western frontier through the eyes of those written out of its history, exploring race, family, survival, and the price of the American dream.
United States 2020
6
The Gilded Cage on the Bosphorus
The Gilded Cage on the Bosphorus
Ayşe Osmanoğlu
Istanbul, 1903. Behind the guarded walls of Çırağan Palace, former Sultan Murad V and his family have spent nearly three decades in enforced confinement, prisoners of the very dynasty they belong to. As political unrest spreads and revolution threatens the Ottoman Empire, Murad fears for the future of his children and grandchildren. He dreams of their freedom, happiness, and the chance to build lives beyond the palace walls. But dangerous political plots, assassination attempts, and family scandals threaten to destroy everything he holds dear. Drawing on the history of her own imperial family, Ayşe Osmanoğlu brings the final decades of Ottoman rule to life in a richly detailed novel about family loyalty, sacrifice, and the price of power.
Türkiye 2020
7
The Shame
The Shame
Makenna Goodman
Alma lives on a rural Vermont homestead, raising her children, tending animals, and managing a household while her husband teaches at a nearby college. But beneath the rhythms of domestic life, she feels increasingly isolated from the creative ambitions and independent identity she has sacrificed. Her fascination with Celeste, a confident ceramicist whose life seems to embody everything Alma lacks, grows into an unsettling obsession. One night, Alma drives away from home, and her memories reveal the tensions that have brought her to this breaking point. Surreal, darkly funny, and psychologically incisive, The Shame explores motherhood, envy, artistic longing, and the quiet desperation of a life that no longer feels like one’s own.
United States 2020
8
Afterlive
Afterlive
Julia Alvarez
What do we owe the people who need us when we are barely holding ourselves together? Antonia Vega, a recently retired literature professor, is still reeling from the sudden death of her beloved husband when her life begins to unravel further: her unpredictable sister disappears, and a pregnant, undocumented teenager turns up seeking shelter. Accustomed to finding answers in books, Antonia discovers that grief and compassion demand more than words. Set in rural Vermont, this intimate, quietly powerful novel explores sisterhood, immigration, moral responsibility, and the courage it takes to begin again. As Antonia navigates a world fractured by fear and distrust, she must decide how to honour her own needs without turning away from the suffering of others.
Dominican Republic 2020
9
The Beauty of Your Face
The Beauty of Your Face
Sahar Mustafah
On an ordinary morning in suburban Chicago, a masked gunman storms an Islamic school, forcing principal Afaf Rahman to confront the memories she has spent a lifetime trying to escape. As she guides her students toward safety, her thoughts return to her childhood as the daughter of Palestinian immigrants, her family’s struggles with faith and belonging, and the devastating events that shaped her life. From her father’s growing disillusionment with America to her sister’s rebellion and her own complicated relationship with Islam, Afaf’s story unfolds across decades of love, loss, and searching. Against a backdrop of rising Islamophobia and cultural alienation, The Beauty of Your Face explores what it means to hold on to faith when the world seems determined to turn you into an outsider. Intimate and deeply moving, it is a novel about sisterhood, resilience, and the possibility of finding beauty and belonging in the most unexpected places.
United States 2020
10
The Discomfort of Evening
The Discomfort of Evening
Lucas Rijneveld
Ten-year-old Jas lives with her deeply religious family on a dairy farm in the rural Netherlands. Her world is shaped by strict religious beliefs, the rhythms of farm life and the unspoken rules governing her family. When her older brother Matthies dies in an accident, Jas struggles to understand the loss and begins to believe that her childhood prayer may somehow have caused his death. As grief settles over the household, her parents withdraw into their own suffering, leaving Jas and her siblings increasingly isolated. Unable to express her fear and confusion directly, Jas retreats into a disturbing inner world filled with strange fantasies, bodily anxieties and dark imaginings. Through the child’s unsettling perspective, Rijneveld portrays a family gradually disintegrating under the weight of unprocessed grief and religious guilt. The novel’s vivid, often shocking imagery captures the vulnerability of childhood and the desperate search for meaning when familiar structures of belief and family life begin to collapse. Winner of the 2020 International Booker Prize, the novel is a haunting exploration of loss, repression and the limits of understanding.
Netherlands 2020
11
Above Us the Milky Way
Above Us the Milky Way
Fowzia Karimi
Above Us the Milky Way is a story about war, immigration, and the remarkable human capacity to create beauty out of horror. As a young family attempts to reconstruct their lives in a new and peaceful country, they are daily drawn back to the first land through remembrance and longing, by news of the continued suffering and loss of loved ones, and by the war dead, who have immigrated and reside with them, haunting their days and illuminating the small joys and wonders offered them by the new land. The novel's structure is built around the alphabet, twenty-six pieces written in the first person that sketch a through-line of memory for the lives of the five daughters, mother, and father. Ghost stories and fairytales are woven with old family photographs and medieval-style watercolor illuminations to create an origin story of loss and remembrance.
Afghanistan 2020
12
Against the Loveless World
Against the Loveless World
Susan Abulhawa
Against the Loveless World follows Nahr, a Palestinian woman whose life is shaped by displacement, political conflict, and the struggle for independence. Born in Kuwait to Palestinian refugee parents, she dreams of finding love, raising a family, and building a stable future. Instead, a series of betrayals and difficult circumstances leads her through different countries in the Middle East, where she encounters exploitation, prejudice, and political upheaval. As the story unfolds through memories narrated from solitary confinement, Nahr reveals the experiences that shaped her transformation from a vulnerable young woman into someone determined to resist the forces controlling her life. Abulhawa explores the intersection of personal freedom and political oppression, examining how gender, exile, and economic hardship influence women’s choices. The novel is a powerful portrait of survival and the determination to claim dignity in an unjust world.
Palestine 2020