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WINNER OF FC2's CATHERINE DOCTOROW INNOVATIVE FICTION PRIZE

A universal story of exile, of the refugee and emigrant, and of all those displaced who can reconstruct a sense of home only by weaving a new fabric of the imagination

For nearly two decades, Şiva has met after work on Tuesdays with four friends at a teahouse called the Kafiye. In interrupted conversations, the women explore what it is to live engaged lives inside and outside the home. Amidst joking and complaints, while drinking too much tea and eating too many sweets, they tell of their days: a son’s ninth birthday, the bruise on the arm of an aging parent, soldiers stationed outside the school, the funeral of an opposition political leader killed in a mysterious car accident.

Set in an unnamed provincial capital of an unnamed country, Benefit Street tells of a wide circle of friends—teachers, lawyers, missionaries, doctors, artisans—in a time of gathering and dispersal. It tells the story of mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, colleagues, and neighbors, as war to the East threatens and constitutional rights are daily eroded by an increasingly authoritarian regime.

The ideals of youth, freedom, and coexistence are severely tested with the shocking revelation that the charismatic leader of their group has sexually abused the women under his care. The limits of reconciliation are tested as Şiva makes an arduous journey into the mountains to meet an estranged mother with a genius for weaving complex rugs.
 

A coming-of-age tale of a young Dominican American boy facing a grave loss and a feathered phantom

Between the looming buildings of Brooklyn, a young Dominican American boy only ever called mijo by his family has just lost his father to brain cancer. In the wake of his grief, he begins to see his deceased father take the form of a pigeon and ghost, acting as protector and advisor in moments of duress and confusion. Determined to find out the truth behind his father’s appearances, he sets out on the streets of Brooklyn with his outspoken friend Naño, and in the hills of the Dominican Republic with his cousin Matias, in search of answers, only to discover more ghostly apparitions and inexplicable occurrences. In a world of lost things and in-betweens, the grief-stricken son must choose whether he can bear to let go of his father or accept the consequences of what we let haunt us.
 

Not since Don DeLillo and George Saunders has a writer caught the humor and irreverent seriousness of our time like Barkan has through his protagonist Paul Berger, a flawed hero whose so-called fate drives him toward enlightenment just as surely as it propels him to destruction. Berger is stunned when he receives an ominous palm reading from a savvy guru at a health retreat in Iowa, of all places. And now it seems the prophecy is coming true. His fiancée, who is about to leave him, is shot at a historic reenactment of the Revolutionary War in Concord. One of his brothers, an astronaut, dies on 9/11 in the Pentagon. And his more famous brother, a lawyer and politician, kidnaps him in a media campaign to win an election. But is Paul’s life really controlled by fate? Or is the prophecy a lie he has latched onto ever since his band went under, leaving him almost famous yet unknown—a teacher at a community college, struggling to keep his job?

Blind Speed is a wildly entertaining exploration of intersecting lives in which what happens is never solely by chance or choice. Barkan has built a uniquely American satirical novel, a thoroughly twisted journey of discovery that pops and fires from its first shot in Concord to its last rifle blast, which echoes across the heartland. With global warming, 9/11, government and corporate deceit, and ecoterrorism, the novel dives into epic ideas, capturing America in all its dangerous myths.

A story of first love across cities spanning the decade that transformed the internet

In the halls of an elite East Coast high school, Arjun and Payal fall in love as the world begins to tilt toward the digital. Over the next eight years, their trajectories diverge as sharply as the fractured internet itself. Payal ascends to the dizzying, dopamine-fueled heights of New York’s influencer economy, finding fame on Boost, a looping video app that is as rewarding as it is demanding. Meanwhile, in a cavernous office in Chicago, Arjun, a musician whose dreams have quieted, now cleans up the same platform’s debris, moderating the internet’s darkest videos. When a brutal act of political violence against a beloved musician goes viral, this rip in reality forces the pair to confront the motivations of the platforms they inhabit. A sharp exploration of creative ambition and the multifarious nature of identity, this is a story of love in the time of infinite scroll and a look at what we sacrifice to be seen.

2026 IPPY Awards Gold Medal Winner, Visionary/New Age Fiction

Blue Basin Island is the final resting spot of formerly enslaved Africans whose souls have flown from Earth—not to heaven or purgatory but toward freedom and a new life. Lucille, the island’s seamstress, takes two forms. She lives among the inhabitants in human form and, along with the evil-repelling blue of the houses, her divine form protects people from the violence of the their former lives. Yet, even there, outside of time, the souls are not totally insulated from the world in which they were enslaved. Each time a Black person anywhere is harmed, a piece of Blue Basin disintegrates: an earthquake leaves hundreds of thousands dead, and bricks crumble on the island; when police kill a Black child asleep in her bed, the blue paint on homes throughout the island drips and then runs from the walls. Lucille must hold the island together, but she struggles to juggle the responsibility of ensuring everyone’s safety while also seeking and losing her own private love. Grounding the story in African folklore and dipping into the rich literary tradition around African people with the power of flight, Zoë Gadegbeku visualizes the destination at the end of the flight and the new life that awaits them.

A mystery linking Manhattan circa 1991 to eastern Afghanistan in 2012, Blue Hours tells of a life-changing friendship between two memorable heroines. When we first meet Mim, she is a recent college graduate who has disavowed her lower middle class roots to befriend Kyra, a dancer and daughter of privilege, until calamity causes their estrangement. Twenty years later, Kyra has gone missing from her NGO’s headquarters in Jalalabad, and Mim—now a recluse in rural New England—embarks on a journey to find her. In its nuance, originality, and moral complexity, Blue Hours becomes an unexpected page-turner.

A searing novel about a community irrevocably transformed by gun violence.

In 2006, a gunman entered a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, taking the students hostage and shooting ten girls before turning his weapon on himself. Set twelve years after this event, largely in the village of Nickel Mines, Butter Road explores the long-reaching ramifications of tragedy through the imagined lives of three women: Emma Walsh, an eighteen-year-old survivor of the shooting; her mother, Ruth, who lost her eldest daughter to the violence; and Sara Caldwell, an “English” outsider and wife of a doctor researching genetic disorders in the Amish population. 

At the novel's outset, Sara enlists young Emma for housework and gardening to help the Walshes alleviate the debt they’ve accumulated caring for Emma’s disabled brother, who has the rare condition Sara’s husband is studying. Over the course of several months, Sara and Emma form a bond, and as Emma explores Sara's library, she begins writing fragments of memory on the backs of old feed calendars—a process that leads her to grapple with the devastating deaths of her sister and friends, and the insularity of Amish forgiveness. The more Emma writes, the more she questions her upbringing and ingrained beliefs, ultimately seeing her relationship to Isaac Ames, the man she is destined to marry, in a new light. The story culminates with the characters making breathtaking, self-searching decisions that alter the lives of others as well as their own. 

Emotionally acute and lyrically spare, Butter Road centers on living with what we can’t control, on understanding trauma and collective grief, and on following one’s heart.