It’s an exciting moment to be announcing the finalists for this year’s Kirkus Prize in Fiction as we celebrate the prize’s 10th anniversary. From the first winner, Lily King’s Euphoria, to the most recent, Trust by Hernan Diaz, the nine books that have earned the prize have stood the test of time. Could Ling Ma’s Severance, from 2018, have been any more prescient in the way it conjured a pandemic? Joy Williams’ Harrow was a chilling look at a dystopian future. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara and Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead have become modern classics. As a group, this year’s stellar finalists are somehow timeless while speaking to the concerns of 2023, and I’m thrilled to introduce them:
Witness by Jamel Brinkley (Farrar, Straus and Giroux): This remarkable collection of stories is set in New York City’s Black community, primarily in Brooklyn neighborhoods on the verge of transformation. Brinkley “vividly and, at times, hauntingly show[s] how the people in those enclaves struggle to withstand, even transcend the changes around them,” according to our review.
White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link (Random House): Across her five collections of short stories, Link has blasted through the boundaries of genre, producing “a body of work that is formally original and emotionally rich,” according to our review. Here, she creates seven modern fairy tales, reimagining the classics in ways that are “enchanting, mesmerizing, brilliant.”
Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton (Farrar, Straus and Giroux): Birnam Wood is a collective of New Zealand eco-activists who plant gardens on unused land, with or without permission. Robert Lemoine is an American tech billionaire who’s buying a remote farm to build a doomsday bunker—the same farm that Birnam Wood has just started scouting. “The novel is as saturated with moral scrutiny and propulsive plotting as 19th-century greats,” according to our review. “It’s a twisty thriller via Charles Dickens, only with drones.”
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride (Riverhead): In the 1930s, the Black and Jewish residents of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, lived side-by-side in the poetically named Chicken Hill neighborhood, where McBride has set what our review calls a “boisterous hymn to community, mercy, and karmic justice” based around a vital meeting place in the guise of a food store.
The Bee Sting by Paul Murray (Farrar, Straus and Giroux): You could compare Murray to an Irish Jonathan Franzen; his latest novel delves deeply into the lives of all four members of the Barnes family as their comfortable life dwindles in the face of a recession, creating brilliantly individual voices for each of them. “A grim and demanding and irresistible anatomy of misfortune,” according to our review.
Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward (Scribner): With evocative language and deep empathy, Ward follows Annis, a young, enslaved Black woman, as she’s marched south to New Orleans and sold because she rejects the sexual advances of her owner, who’s also her “sire.” Our review notes “the power, precision, and visionary flow of Ward’s writing, the way she makes the unimaginable horror, soul-crushing drudgery, and haphazard cruelties of the distant past vivid.”
Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.
