“City of Thorns,” by Ben Rawlence (Picador):
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by Patricia Engel (Grove Atlantic):
The story of a young woman’s devotion to her brother on death row and the journey she takes toward a freer future. Set in Miami, Havana, and Carta- gena, this novel explores the beauty of the natural world and the solace it brings.
The 2017 Dayton Liter- ary Peace Prize nonfiction finalists are: The stories of nine individualstellwhatlifeislikein Dadaab, the world’s largest refugee camp, sketching the wider political forces that keep the refugees trapped.
“Hillbilly Elegy,” by J.D. Vance (Harper Collins):
Fromaf ormer marine and Yale Law School grad- uate, a powerful account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America’s white working class.
“The Hundred-Year Walk,” by Dawn MacKeen (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt):
MacKeen alter- nates between her grandfather Stepan’s courageous account of surviving the Armenian genocide of 1915, drawn from his long-lost journals, and her own story as she attempts to retrace hisst eps, setting out alone to Turkey and Syria, shadowing her resourceful, resilient grandfather across a landscape still rife with ten- sion.
“The Song Poet,” by Kao Kalia Yang (Metropolitan Books):
Recounts the life of Yang’s father Bee Yang, a Hmong refugee in Minnesota, driven from the mountains of Laos by American’s war in Southeast Asia. It is a love story — of a daughter for her father, a father for his children, a people for their land, their traditions, and all t hatthey have lost.
“What Have We Done,” by David Wood (Little, Brown & Company):
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Wood examin es a poorly under- stood experience among our soldiers: moral injury, the violation of our fundamental values of right and wrong that so often occurs in modern conflict.
“While the City Slept,” by Eli Sanders (Viking):
A Pulitzer Prize- winning reporter’s account of a young man’s path to murder, and a meditation on the state of American mental health care.
A winner and runner-up in fiction and nonfiction will be announced on Oct. 3, with the winner receiving a $10,000 honorarium and the runner-up receiving $2,500. The awards ceremony will take place Nov. 5 at the Schuster Center, beginning at 5 p.m.
Organizers announced in July that Irish novelist, journalist and essayist Colm Tóibín, whose fiction and nonfiction captures the impact of exile and political conflict on individual lives, will receive the 2017 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, named in honor of the noted U.S. diplomat who helped negotiate the Dayton Peace Accords.