Award
Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction
The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction honors outstanding debut novels, recognizing new voices of exceptional originality and promise. Presented as part of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, it is named for longtime editor and critic Art Seidenbaum and reflects his commitment to championing emerging writers.
2025
Ibis
There is bad luck in New Felicity. The people of the small coastal village have taken in Milagros, an 11-year-old Venezuelan refugee, just as Trinidad’s government has begun cracking down on undocumented migrants—and now an American journalist has come to town asking questions.
New Felicity’s...
2024
Cinema Love
A staggering epic about men and women who find themselves in forbidden relationships, the weight of secrets, and the persistence of memory. Spanning decades, from post-socialist China to contemporary New York, Cinema Love is a tour de force about gay men and the women who marry them.
Thirty years...
2023
Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)
One of the few indisputable geniuses of pop music, Sly Stone is a trailblazer and a legend. He created a new kind of music, mixing Black and white, male and female, funk and rock. As a songwriter, he penned some of the most iconic anthems of the 1960s and ’70s, from “Everyday People” to “Family...
2022
The Return of Faraz Ali
Not since childhood has Faraz returned to the Mohalla, in Lahore’s walled inner city, where women continue to pass down the art of courtesan from mother to daughter. But he still remembers the day he was abducted from the home he shared with his mother and sister there, at the direction of his...
2021
Brood
Over the course of a single year, our nameless narrator heroically tries to keep her small brood of four chickens alive despite the seemingly endless challenges that caring for another creature entails. From the forty-below nights of a brutal Minnesota winter to a sweltering summer which brings a...
2020
These Ghosts Are Family
Stanford Solomon’s shocking, thirty-year-old secret is about to change the lives of everyone around him. Stanford has done something no one could ever imagine. He is a man who faked his own death and stole the identity of his best friend. Stanford Solomon is actually Abel Paisley. And now, nearing...
2019
The Old Drift
On the banks of the Zambezi River, a few miles from the majestic Victoria Falls, there was once a colonial settlement called The Old Drift. Here begins the epic story of a small African nation, told by a mysterious swarm-like chorus that calls itself man’s greatest nemesis. The tale? A playful...
2018
Heads of the Colored People
Set across contemporary Black communities—often among middle-class professionals and academics—Heads of the Colored People weaves together a series of stories that examine identity, ambition, and the pressure to define oneself in spaces shaped by expectation and scrutiny. The characters range from...
2017
Sour Heart
Jenny Zhang's stories cut across generations and continents, moving from the fraught halls of a public school in Flushing, Queens, to the tumultuous streets of Shanghai, China, during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.
In the absence of grown-ups, latchkey kids experiment on each other until one...
2016
The Nix
It’s 2011, and Samuel Andresen-Anderson hasn’t seen his mother, Faye, in decades—not since she abandoned the family when he was a boy. Now she’s reappeared, having committed an absurd crime that electrifies the nightly news and inflames a politically divided country. The media paints Faye as a...
2015
The Fishermen
Told by nine-year-old Benjamin, the youngest of four brothers, The Fishermen is the Cain and Abel-esque story of a childhood in Nigeria, in the small town of Akure. When their father has to travel to a distant city for work, the brothers take advantage of his absence to skip school and go...
2014
Faces in the Crowd
Moving between New York City and Mexico City, Faces in the Crowd follows a young woman whose life unfolds across shifting layers of time, memory, and imagination. In one thread, she is a translator living in New York, drifting through a fragile existence of temporary jobs and fleeting relationships...
2013
We Need New Names
Darling is only ten years old, and yet she must navigate a fragile and violent world. In Zimbabwe, Darling and her friends steal guavas, try to get the baby out of young Chipo's belly, and grasp at memories of Before. Before their homes were destroyed by paramilitary policemen, before the school...
2012
Seating Arrangements
Winn Van Meter is heading for his family’s retreat on the pristine New England island of Waskeke. Normally a haven of calm, for the next three days this sanctuary will be overrun by tipsy revelers as Winn prepares for the marriage of his daughter Daphne to the affable young scion Greyson...
2011
Shards
Ismet Prcic’s brilliant, provocative, and propulsively energetic debut is about a young Bosnian, also named Ismet Prcic, who has fled his war-torn homeland and is now struggling to reconcile his past with his present life in California. He is advised that in order to make peace with the corrosive...
2010
The Lotus Eaters
In the final days of a falling Saigon, *The Lotus Eaters* unfolds the story of three remarkable photographers brought together under the impossible umbrella of war: Helen Adams, a once-naïve ingénue whose ambition conflicts with her desire over the course of the fighting; Linh, the mysterious...
2009
American Rust
Left alone to care for his aging father after his mother dies by suicide and his sister escapes to Yale, Isaac English longs for a life beyond his hometown, a beautiful but economically devastated Pennsylvania steel town.
But when he finally sets out to leave for good, accompanied by his...
2008
Finding Nouf
When sixteen-year-old Nouf goes missing, along with a truck and her favorite camel, her prominent family calls on Nayir al-Sharqi, a desert guide, to lead a search party. Ten days later, just as Nayir is about to give up in frustration, her body is discovered by anonymous desert travelers. But when...
2007
The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
Seventeen years ago, Sepha Stephanos fled the Ethiopian Revolution for a new start in the United States. Now he finds himself running a failing grocery store in a poor African-American section of Washington, D.C., his only companions two fellow African immigrants who share his bitter nostalgia and...
2006
Whiteman
In an Ivory Coast village where Christians and Muslims are squaring off for war, against a backdrop of bloody conflict and vibrant African life, Jack Diaz—an American relief worker—and Mamadou, his village guardian, learn that hate knows no color and that true heroism waits where we least expect...
2005
Beasts of No Nation
As civil war rages in an unnamed West-African nation, Agu, the school-aged protagonist of this stunning novel, is recruited into a unit of guerilla fighters. Haunted by his father’s own death at the hands of militants, which he fled just before witnessing, Agu is vulnerable to the dangerous yet...
2004
Harbor
Harbor recounts the adventures of Aziz Arkoun who, at twenty-four, makes his way to America via the hold of an Algerian tanker and the icy waters of Boston harbor. Aziz soon finds himself in a community of fellow Algerians, but their means of survival in this strange land begins to remind him of the...
2003
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Christopher John Francis Boone knows all the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. Although gifted with a superbly logical brain, Christopher is autistic. Everyday interactions and admonishments have little meaning for him. At fifteen, Christopher’s carefully...
2002
Prague
A first novel of startling scope and ambition, Prague depicts an intentionally lost Lost Generation as it follows five American expats who come to Budapest in the early 1990s to seek their fortune—financial, romantic, and spiritual—in an exotic city newly opened to the West. They harbor the vague...
2001
The Dark Room
A boy born with a physical deformity finds work as a photographer's assistant during the 1930s and captures on film the changing temper of Berlin, the city he loves. But his acute photographic eye never provides him with the power to understand the significance of what he sees through his camera....
2000
The Romantics
The young Brahman Samar has come to the holy city of Benares to complete his education and take the civil service exam that will determine his future. But in this city redolent of timeworn customs, where pilgrims bathe in the sacred Ganges and breathe in smoke from burning ghats along the shore,...
1999
Amy and Isabelle
With compassion, humor, and striking insight, Amy and Isabelle explores the secrets of sexuality that jeopardize the love between a mother and her daughter.
Amy Goodrow, a shy high school student in a small mill town, falls in love with her math teacher, and together they cross the line between...
1998
Kalimantaan
A hundred and fifty years ago, a young Englishman founded a private raj on the coast of Borneo. The world that resulted, boasting stone quays, great swaths of lawn, three Christian churches, and musical levees, eventually encompassed a territory the size of England, its campaigns paid for in human...
1997
Don't Erase Me
Set largely in the South Bronx, Don’t Erase Me is a powerful collection of interconnected stories that follows Black teenagers coming of age in environments shaped by poverty, pressure, and resilience. Each story centers on a different voice, capturing moments of vulnerability, defiance, and...
1996
The Smell of Apples
Told through the eyes of Marnus Erasmus, a young boy growing up in 1970s South Africa, The Smell of Apples presents a seemingly ordinary childhood shaped by family, school, and the quiet routines of daily life. Marnus idolizes his father, a high-ranking military officer, and accepts without question...
1995
American Studies
Middle-aged and recently dismissed from his university position, Professor Reeve finds his carefully constructed life unraveling. Once a respected academic, he now drifts through Washington, D.C., grappling with the loss of his career, the lingering effects of illness, and the quiet isolation that...
1994
The Year of the Frog
Set in communist Czechoslovakia, The Year of the Frog follows a young boy growing up in a world quietly shaped by political repression and uncertainty. Through his eyes, everyday life unfolds with a mix of curiosity and unease, as he tries to make sense of the adults around him—especially his...
1993
Love: Enter
After graduating from college, Dan Shoenfeld heads abroad for a year in search of something undefined—experience, direction, maybe even himself. In Paris, he meets Bou and Margot, two women whose intense, complicated relationship immediately draws him in. As he becomes closer to them, Dan finds...
1992
High Cotton
An elegant, insightful novel that evokes the world of upper-middle-class blacks, following an unnamed narrator from a safe childhood in conservative Indianapolis, to a brief tenure as minister of information for a local radical organization, to the life of an expatriate in Paris.
Through it all,...
1991
Pangs of Love
Set in New York City, Pangs of Love follows three Chinese American men—each at a different stage of adulthood—as they navigate love, identity, and the complicated expectations placed on them by both family and culture. Through their intertwined stories, the novel explores the tensions between...