One transports you to a Turkish prison through a bathroom door. Another strands you at LAX alongside an estranged father and daughter, watching flights continually disappear from the board. Another injects you inside a mob that’s crashing through a door in Kingston, where you discover eight gay men — one of whom doesn’t know it’s some of his final moments — rehearsing a play.
That’s only a small peek at the novels comprising the longlist for the 2026 National Book Award for Fiction. The list, announced in September after judges whittled 451 submissions down to 10, isn’t simply stacked: it’s genuinely weird. And that’s a good thing. One former winner sits alongside debut novelists; some of the most surreal premises in years and sprawling epics dominate. The five finalists will be announced October 6, but until then, let’s have some fun arguing which earned their keep.
10
‘Red Ants’ by Kimberly Blaeser
Anishinaabe life is a topic deep enough to mine on its own. But with Red Ants, Kimberly Blaeser burrows further than expected, tapping into a deep strangeness. There are murder mysteries and fancy dog contests, facial-recognition software and monsters, tree doctors and mosquitoes. The stories are delivered through horror, myth, and speculative fiction. Time and again across the collection, everyday life on the reservation rubs against forces that aren’t so easily explained — creating a spark each and every time.
Readers have to wait until the collection officially drops on October 20. But its sheer range has generated the type of buzz that’ll have them itching to get a copy: Booklist gave Blaeser’s prose debut a starred review, while the Chicago Review of Books named it among its most anticipated titles of the year.
9
‘Passengers’ by Alexander Maksik
A father convinces his estranged daughter to travel with him to Europe, all in the hopes that the forced proximity helps bridge the gap between them. But the departure board doesn’t comply. Their flight is delayed; other flights disappear from the board entirely. Security tightens around them, though nobody explains what’s going on outside. All they know is they’re stuck at LAX. It’s a setup to what could be an apocalyptic disaster thriller — all unfolding in the claustrophobic confines of an airport. But Alexander Maksik takes off in another direction.
The journey at the center of Passengers is internal, exploring the decades of resentment between Ivan and his daughter Nina. It’s almost completely uninterested in the disaster that’s unfolding outside the terminal. Those interested in gritty family sagas will find the novel moving; others will be disappointed in what can feel like a bit of bait and switch.
8
‘Paradiso 17’ by Hannah Lillith Assadi
Paradiso 17 is sweeping and heartbreaking. But it’s also frustrating in equal measure. It follows Sufien through decades of his life. Born in Palestine just before the Nakba, he’s forced from his house with the blue door, which becomes the fixed point of the rest of his life. He then moves through Kuwait and Italy, eventually settling in America. Through all those points in his life, Sufien accumulates marriages and affairs, drinks and debts. He also continuously finds the most elaborate ways of self-sabotaging, destroying what little stability he’s managed at the time.
The New York Times praised Lillith Assadi and her refusal to romanticize exile, with the book also finding its way onto the Women’s Prize longlist. Ultimately, though, Sufien’s selfishness, the slow middle, and the novel’s looping structure build an anchor that keeps the book from truly soaring.
7
‘Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You’ by Julián Delgado Lopera
Valentina’s mother drowns. That’s the sad start to Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You. But there’s more depression seeping through the early chapters, mostly pouring from her father. They share a cramped Bogotá apartment, but there’s no closeness. Ignacio, her father, slides through life on autopilot; Valentina lives vicariously through television and the few scraps of family history she’s able to uncover. And then the novel folds back upon itself, exploring Ignacio’s adolescence — a time in which violence punctuated masculinity and a queer life was merely glimpsed through Bogotá’s underground.
It’s a split that some will consider a strength, as both stories possess a strong grip. But it’s likely to lose others, as it’s Ignacio’s past that gives the novel some of its most electric material. It’s particularly apparent in the parts dealing with Colombia’s queer community; it’s magnetic when dealing with the Magdalena River, which becomes part landscape, part graveyard, part family history. Jumping back into Valentina’s life when Ignacio’s world is a touch more vivid sometimes feels like an interruption.
6
‘Mad Eden’ by Morgan Thomas
Mad Eden boasts one of the stranger structures on the list. Ro — who works helping people access gender-affirming care — along with their partner Liam, becomes obsessed with an anonymous online fantasy serial called “Mad Eden,” which is constructed from language pulled out of an academic paper on autism. But then someone posing as the parent of a trans child secretly records one of Ro’s telehealth appointments, edited footage of which lands in an anti-trans newsletter. Threats follow, and the safety Ro and Liam built starts to crumble.
Morgan Thomas folds a lot into the narrative — emails and social-media posts atop chunks of the fantasy serial. That can, at times, slow the pace. But Thomas never wanders from the emotional center: Ro clutching to the love and joy within their life as danger continues to pull them away.
5
‘The Renovation’ by Kenan Orhan
The Renovation isn’t the first book with a door-as-portal theme. But Kenan Orhan adds a whole new freshness to the concept. And it all starts when contractors finish renovating protagonist Dilara’s bathroom. When she opens the door, she’s no longer in the Italian apartment she shares with her husband and father, who has dementia; she’s inside a cell in Turkey’s Silivri Prison. The deeper she goes into the cell, the more her life outside it unravels — her father further deteriorates, her marriage strains. But she also strangely finds the homeland she escaped more and more comforting.
It’s Kafkaesque fiction and political allegory in which exile becomes something Dilara can literally walk through — which alone keeps the pages turning. Unfortunately, Dilara herself has less dimension than that central metaphor, leaving a good bit to be desired for those who prefer character-driven stories.
4
‘Dèy’ by Edwidge Danticat
Silence is what ultimately drives Dèy. A gunman opens fire when Magnolia is in a Miami mall. She takes cover inside a restaurant, survives, and walks out. She tells no one she was there. Magnolia instead chooses to continue life as if nothing happened — selling houses, slogging through separation from her husband, and worrying about her parents in Haiti. But the shooting keeps piercing her life in ways she can’t control.
With such a propulsive start, the novel is astonishingly quiet. And that’s the real power of it. Danticat’s slow pacing gives the reader room to sit with the questions — about love, home, and everything in between — that arise through the narrative, something The New York Times praised. Watching as Magnolia realizes merely surviving something and moving past it are not mutually exclusive is what readers will remember far longer than any plot points.
3
‘Python’s Kiss’ by Louise Erdrich
A girl forms a bond with a Burmese python. A school bus disappears into a blizzard. A woman enters a corporately owned afterlife looking for revenge on her father. Someone else decides a stone will be her companion for life. Those are only a few of the 13 stories in Python’s Kiss, Louise Erdrich’s first collection of short fiction in decades. The stories deal with everything from Native life, family, and animals to violence, grief, and oddly normalized supernatural happenings.
It’s that exact range that’ll make or break the collection. Those who prefer being dropped into a fully formed world, watching as something strange unfolds, and moving on to the next will find themselves right at home in these pages. But those who prefer the tone or subject matter to build momentum from story to story with a little more cohesion may find themselves lost in the untethered flow.
2
‘Beginning Middle End’ by Valeria Luiselli
Manuela has a simple request for her novelist mother: Could the next book please have a beginning, a middle, and an end? Her mother, Ella, has just gotten divorced, her own mother is beginning to lose her memory, and 12-year-old Manuela is starting to develop a life that doesn’t belong entirely to her anymore. The pair head to Sicily, where Ella not only plans to write, but to return a small mosaic of Proteus her grandmother may have stolen years earlier. All the while Mount Etna is erupting nearby, which adds a literal sense of instability to a trip full of emotional fault lines.
Valeria Luiselli somehow combines Greek and Roman mythology, photography, migration, motherhood, climate anxiety, and family history into the trip. That can, at times, wander a little too far from the straight pathway plot-first readers comfortably travel. But those digressions are where the novel opens up most, turning a simple mother-daughter trip into something bigger.
1
‘The Disappearers’ by Marlon James
The Disappearers starts out simply: 1988 Kingston. Eight gay men rehearsing a play. Marlon James lulls the reader into the story through the basics — friendships, hookups, rivalries, and messy intimacies. All the basic mundanities you’d expect from a group of strangers spending a long time together. But then that simplicity shatters. A mob breaks through the door, beating the men, killing one. The novel then shifts gears again, pacing through the lives of the men left behind, tracking how each deals with the remnants of themselves left from that fateful night.
The Disappearers is a beast of a book — it runs 600-plus pages. James simply refuses to smooth out the aftermath into one single, clean arc, jumping between interviews, journals, letters and monologues detailing sex, rage, revenge, and Jamaican patois. That sprawl isn’t easy on most readers, especially those who tend towards tighter stories. But it’s also what gives the novel such an intense force, allowing all the messiness, humor, horniness, and pain these men feel to seep through.