2022 Kirkus Prize: 18 fiction, nonfiction, young readers’ books compete for $50,000 cash prize

The finalists for the 2022 Kirkus Prize were announced on September 8 with 18 works of fiction, nonfiction, and young readers’ literature in the running for some of the most high-paying annual literary awards in the world. The winners in each of the categories will receive a $50,000 cash award. Their names will be announced on October 27 in a ceremony at the Austin Central Library in Texas, US.

The books that have been shortlisted for the prizes have received starred reviews from Kirkus – that are given for ‘exceptional merit’ to approximately 10 per cent of all books reviewed by the publication. “This year’s crop of Kirkus Prize finalists is an exhilaratingly diverse collection of books on a wide range of topics,” said Tom Beer, Kirkus’ editor-in-chief about this year’s shortlist.

Fiction shortlist

Scary Monsters, Michelle de Kretser

Lili’s family migrated to Australia from Asia when she was a teenager. Now, in the 1980s, she’s teaching in the south of France. She makes friends, observes the treatment handed out to North African immigrants and is creeped out by her downstairs neighbour. All the while, Lili is striving to be A Bold, Intelligent Woman like Simone de Beauvoir.

Lyle works for a sinister government department in near-future Australia. An Asian migrant, he fears repatriation and embraces ‘Australian values’. He’s also preoccupied by his ambitious wife, his wayward children and his strong-minded elderly mother. Islam has been banned in the country, the air is smoky from a Permanent Fire Zone, and one pandemic has already run its course.
Three scary monsters – racism, misogyny and ageism – roam through this mesmerising novel. Its reversible format enacts the disorientation that migrants experience when changing countries changes the story of their lives.

Trust, Hernan Diaz

Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the brilliant daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth. But the secrets around their affluence and grandeur incites gossip. oRumours about Benjamin’s financial manoeuvres and Helen’s reclusiveness start to spread – all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. At what cost have they acquired their immense fortune?

This is the mystery at the centre of a successful 1938 novel entitled Bonds, which all of New York seems to have read. But it isn’t the only version.

God’s Children are Little Broken Things: Stories, Arinze Ifeakandu

A man revisits the university campus where he lost his first love, aware now of what he couldn’t understand then. A young musician rises to fame at the price of pieces of himself, and the man who loves him. In nine exhilarating stories of queer love in contemporary Nigeria, God’s Children Are Little Broken Things explores with tenderness and grace the fundamental question of the heart: can deep love and hope be sustained in spite of the dominant expectations of society, and great adversity.

Mecca, Susan Straight

Johnny Frías has California in his blood. A descendant of the state’s Indigenous people and Mexican settlers, he has Southern California’s forgotten towns and canyons in his soul. He spends his days as a highway patrolman pulling over speeders, ignoring their racist insults, and pushing past the trauma of his rookie year, when he killed a man assaulting a young woman named Bunny, who ran from the scene, leaving Johnny without a witness. But like the Santa Ana winds that every year bring the risk of fire, Johnny’s moment of action twenty years ago sparked a slow-burning chain of connections that unites a vibrant, complex cast of characters in ways they never see coming.

Mecca captures California in all its injustice, history, and glory, as it tells a story of the American West through the eyes of the people who built it – and continue to sustain it. As the stakes get higher and the intertwined characters in Mecca slam against barrier after barrier, they find that when push comes to shove, it’s always better to push back.

Scattered All Over the Earth, Yoko Tawada, translated from the Japanese by Margarest Mitsutani

Welcome to the not-too-distant future: Japan, having vanished from the face of the earth, is now remembered as “the land of sushi.” Hiruko, its former citizen and a climate refugee herself, has a job teaching immigrant children in Denmark with her invented language Panska (Pan-Scandinavian): “homemade language. no country to stay in. three countries I experienced. insufficient space in brain. so made new language. homemade language.”

As she searches for anyone who can still speak her mother tongue, Hiruko soon makes new friends. Her troupe travels to France, encountering an umami cooking competition; a dead whale; an ultra-nationalist named Breivik; unrequited love; Kakuzo robots; red herrings; uranium; an Andalusian matador. Episodic and mesmerising scenes flash vividly along, and soon they’re all next off to Stockholm.

The Books of Jacob, Olga Tokarczuk, translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft

In the mid-18 th century, as new ideas – and a new unrest – begin to sweep the Continent, a young Jew of mysterious origins arrives in a village in Poland. Before long, he has changed not only his name but his persona; visited by what seem to be ecstatic experiences, Jacob Frank casts a charismatic spell that attracts an increasingly fervent following.

In the decade to come, Frank will traverse the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires with throngs of disciples in his thrall as he reinvents himself again and again, converts to Islam and then Catholicism, is pilloried as a heretic and revered as the Messiah, and wreaks havoc on the conventional order, Jewish and Christian alike, with scandalous rumors of his sect’s secret rituals and the spread of his increasingly iconoclastic beliefs.

Narrated through the perspectives of his contemporaries – those who revere him, those who revile him, the friend who betrays him, the lone woman who sees him for what he is – The Books of Jacob captures a world on the cusp of precipitous change, searching for certainty and longing for transcendence.

Nonfiction shortlist

By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners, Margaret A Burnham

In By Hands Now Known, Margaret A Burnham, director of Northeastern University’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, challenges the reader’s understanding of the Jim Crow era by exploring the relationship between formal law and background legal norms in a series of harrowing cases from 1920 to 1960.

From rendition, the legal process by which states make claims to other states for the return of their citizens, to battles over state and federal jurisdiction and the outsize role of local sheriffs in enforcing racial hierarchy, Burnham maps the criminal legal system in the mid-twentieth-century South, and traces the unremitting line from slavery to the legal structures of this period through to today.

Drawing on an extensive database, collected over more than a decade and exceeding 1,000 cases of racial violence, Burnham reveals the true legal system of Jim Crow, and captures the memories of those whose stories have not yet been heard.

The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon’s Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I, Lindsey Fitzharris

From the moment the first machine gun rang out over the Western Front, one thing was clear: humankind’s military technology had wildly surpassed its medical capabilities. Bodies were battered, gouged, hacked, and gassed. The First World War claimed millions of lives and left millions more wounded and disfigured. In the midst of this brutality, however, there were also those who strove to alleviate suffering. The Facemaker tells the extraordinary story of such an individual: the pioneering plastic surgeon Harold Gillies, who dedicated himself to reconstructing the burned and broken faces of the injured soldiers under his care.

Gillies, a Cambridge-educated New Zealander, became interested in the nascent field of plastic surgery after encountering the human wreckage on the front. Returning to Britain, he established one of the world’s first hospitals dedicated entirely to facial reconstruction. There, Gillies assembled a unique group of practitioners whose task was to rebuild what had been torn apart, to re-create what had been destroyed.

The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, created by Nikole Hannah-Jones

In late August 1619, a ship arrived in the British colony of Virginia bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival led to the barbaric and unprecedented system of American chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country’s original sin, but it is more than that: It is the source of so much that still defines the United States.

The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story builds on The New York Times Magazine’s award-winning “1619 Project,” which reframed our understanding of American history by placing slavery and its continuing legacy at the centre of the national narrative. This book substantially expands on the original “1619 Project by weaving together eighteen essays that explore the legacy of slavery in present-day America with thirty-six poems and works of fiction that illuminate key moments of oppression, struggle, and resistance.

The essays show how the inheritance of 1619 reaches into every part of contemporary American society, from politics, music, diet, traffic, and citizenship to capitalism, religion, and our democracy itself. This legacy can be seen in the way we tell stories, the way we teach our children, and the way we remember. Together, the elements of the book reveal a new origin story for the United States, one that helps explain not only the persistence of anti-Black racism and inequality in American life today, but also the roots of what makes the country unique.

These Precious Days: Essays, Ann Patchett

Turning her writer’s eye on her own experiences, Patchett transforms the private experiences of life into the universal, providing us all a way to look at our own worlds anew, and reminds how fleeting and enigmatic life can be.

From the enchantments of Kate di Camilo’s children’s books to youthful memories of Paris; the cherished life gifts given by her three fathers to the unexpected influence of Charles Schultz’s Snoopy; the expansive vision of Eudora Welty to the importance of knitting, Patchett connects life and art as she illuminates what matters most. Infused with the author’s grace, wit, and warmth, the pieces in These Precious Days resonate deep in the soul, leaving an indelible mark.

In Sensorium: Notes for My People, Tanaïs

Focusing their gaze on our most primordial sense, writer and perfumer Tanaïs weaves a brilliant and expansive memoir, a reckoning that offers a critical, alternate history of South Asia from an American Bangladeshi Muslim femme perspective. From stories of their childhood in the South, Midwest, and New York; to transcendent experiences with lovers, psychedelics, and fragrances; to trips home to their motherland, Tanaïs builds a universe of memories and scent: a sensorium.

Alongside their personal history, and at the very heart of this work, is an interrogation of the ancient violence of caste, rape culture, patriarchy, war, and the inherited ancestral trauma of being from a lush land constantly denuded, a land still threatened and disappearing because of colonisation, capitalism, and climate change. In Sensorium interlaces eons of South Asian perfume history, erotic and religious texts, survivor testimonies, and material culture with memoir.

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, Ed Yong

Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world. This book welcomes the reader into a previously unfathomable dimension – the world as it is truly perceived by other animals.

The readers encounter beetles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the Earth’s magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and humans that wield sonar like bats. Author and acclaimed science journalist Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, allowing us to perceive the skeins of scent, waves of electromagnetism, and pulses of pressure that surround us. Because in order to understand our world we don’t need to travel to other places; we need to see through other eyes.

Young readers’ literature

The Golden Hour, Niki Smith

Struggling with anxiety after witnessing a harrowing instance of gun violence, Manuel Soto copes through photography, using his cellphone camera to find anchors that keep him grounded. His days are a lonely, latchkey monotony until he’s teamed with his classmates, Sebastian and Caysha, for a group project.

Sebastian lives on a grass-fed cattle farm outside of town, and Manuel finds solace in the open fields and in the antics of the newborn calf Sebastian is hand-raising. As Manuel aides his new friends in their preparations for the local county fair, he learns to open up, confronts his deepest fears, and even finds first love.

The Troubled Girls of Dragomir Academy, Anne Ursu

If no one notices Marya Lupu, it is likely because of her brother, Luka. And that’s because of what everyone knows: that Luka is destined to become a sorcerer. The Lupus might be from a small village far from the capital city of Illyria, but that doesn’t matter. Every young boy born in the kingdom holds the potential for the rare ability to wield magic, to protect the country from the terrifying force known only as the Dread.

For all the hopes the family has for Luka, no one has any for Marya, who can never seem to do anything right. But even so, no one is prepared for the day that the sorcerers finally arrive to test Luka for magical ability, and Marya makes a terrible mistake. Nor the day after, when the Lupus receive a letter from a place called Dragomir Academy – a mysterious school for wayward young girls. Girls like Marya.

Soon she is a hundred miles from home, in a strange and unfamiliar place, surrounded by girls she’s never met. Dragomir Academy promises Marya and her classmates a chance to make something of themselves in service to one of the country’s powerful sorcerers. But as they learn how to fit into a world with no place for them, they begin to discover things about the magic the men of their country wield, as well as the Dread itself – things that threaten the precarious balance upon which Illyria is built.

Coffee, Rabbit, Snowdrop, Lost, Betina Birkjær, illustrated by Anna Margrethe Kjærgaard, translated from the Danish by Sinéad Quirke Køngerskov

Stump always has a fantastic time with his grandparents, filled with flowers, puzzles, crosswords, and endless love. But one day, Stump’s grandfather starts to lose his memory – and his words, which literally fall from him. Stump tries his best to keep the lost words safe, collecting them in a special box. But Grandpa seems to forget more and more everyday, and the situation comes to a head one snowy night when Stump wakes up to find Grandpa missing. Together, Stump and Grandma must find new ways to connect with Grandpa, and show him that he’s not alone.

This poignant, tender picture book depicts the struggle of coping with a loved one’s dementia with honesty and sensitivity, with a message of hope that affirms the deep bonds of love between grandchild and grandparent.

The Year We Learned to Fly, Jacqueline Woodson, illustrated by Rafael López

On a dreary, stuck-inside kind of day, a brother and sister heed their grandmother’s advice: “Use those beautiful and brilliant minds of yours. Lift your arms, close your eyes, take a deep breath, and believe in a thing. Somebody somewhere at some point was just as bored you are now.” And before they know it, their imaginations lift them up and out of their boredom.

Then, on a day full of quarrels, it’s time for a trip outside their minds again, and they are able to leave their anger behind. This precious skill, their grandmother tells them, harkens back to the days long before they were born, when their ancestors showed the world the strength and resilience of their beautiful and brilliant minds.

Himawari House, Harmony Becker

When Nao returns to Tokyo to reconnect with her Japanese heritage, she books a yearlong stay at the Himawari sharehouse. There she meets Hyejung and Tina, two other girls who came to Japan to freely forge their own paths. The trio live together, share meals, and even attend the same Japanese-language school, which results in them becoming fast friends. But will they be able to hold one another up as life tests them with new loves, old heartbreaks, and the everyday challenges of being fish out of water?

How You Grow Wings, Rimma Onoseta

Sisters Cheta and Zam couldn’t be more different. Cheta, sharp-tongued and stubborn, never shies away from conflict – either at school or at home, where her mother fires abuse at her. Timid Zam escapes most of her mother’s anger, skating under the radar and avoiding her sister whenever possible. In a turn of good fortune, Zam is invited to live with her aunt’s family in the lap of luxury. Jealous, Cheta also leaves home, but finds a harder existence that will drive her to terrible decisions. When the sisters are reunited, Zam alone will recognise just how far Cheta has fallen – and Cheta’s fate will rest in Zam’s hands.

How You Grow Wings explores classism, colourism, cycles of abuse, how loyalty doesn’t always come attached to love, and the messy truths that sometimes family is not a source of comfort and that morality is all shades of grey.