The Orwell Prizes have announced their finalists for the 2026 Political Fiction book prize! Take a look at these shortlisted titles, available with your library card.
Want more suggested books? Take a look at our recommendations.
A Private Man
Stephanie Sy-Quia
Rome, 1953. David is young, handsome, charismatic, and sworn to celibacy. He is freshly ordained, and about to return to England to begin life as a priest. Devotion to God is all he’s ever known, and all he thinks he ever will.
In London, Margaret is entangled in an impossible love affair. Increasingly drawn to the Church, she sets out to join the new revolutions of sex and faith. Decades later, she is being cared for by her grandson, who has just discovered the strange truth of his family history.
Every one Still Here
Liadan Ní Chuinn
A young girl spends her days on a double-decker bus.
A bride-to-be prays to St Valentine’s bones.
Bouquets are found all over a museum.
Teenagers gather to dissect a human body.
Brimming with compassion and thrumming with energy, these stories are scrupulous in their attention to detail, epic in their scope. In this bravura debut collection, Liadan Ní Chuinn delivers a consummate blend of the personal and the political.
Flashlight
Susan Choi
One evening, ten-year-old Louisa and her father take a walk out on the breakwater. They are spending the summer in a coastal Japanese town while her father Serk, a Korean émigré, completes an academic secondment from his American university.
When Louisa wakes up hours later, she has washed up on the beach and her father is missing, likely drowned. The disappearance of Louisa’s father shatters their small family unit, and she and her American mother Anne return to the US profoundly changed.
This traumatic event reverberates across time and space, as we follow mother and daughter trying to go on with their lives, while the mystery of what really happened to Serk that night slowly unravels.
John of John
Douglas Stuart
Out of money and with little to show for his art school education, John-Calum Macleod takes the ferry home to the island of Harris to find that not much has changed except for him.
In the windswept croft where he grew up, Cal resumes his old life, caught between the two poles of his childhood: his father John, a sheep farmer, weaver, and pillar of their local Presbyterian church, and his Glaswegian grandmother Ella, who has kept a faltering peace with her son-in-law for decades.
While Cal wonders if any lonely men might be found on the barren hillsides of home, John is dismayed by his son’s long hair and how he seems unwilling to be Saved.
As the seasons pass, everything is poised to change as the threads holding together the fragile community become increasingly entangled.
The Comfort of Distant Stars
I.O. Echeruo
Ezeani is no ordinary child. He sees things others don’t. Despite the burden of these visions, his precocious nature blossoms into genius and Ezeani grows up to be a gifted mathematician and physicist.
When he leaves Nigeria and his adoring family behind to study at Cornell in the US, he remains haunted by his most persistent vision, Anyanwu, the Sun God. While Ezeani is adjusting to his new life in America, Anyanwu’s presence takes on an increasingly sinister and malevolent form – and chaos reigns. It’s enough to make anyone lose their grip on reality.
‘The Comfort of Distant Stars’ is a bold coming-of-age tale blending physics, philosophy and Igbo cosmology, examining how we understand our place in the universe. It ponders the big questions we all ask ourselves about the nature of time and of being – ultimately revealing the startling vulnerability of the human mind.
This is Where the Serpent Lives
Daniyal Mueenuddin
Yazid rises from abject poverty to the role of trusted servant to an affluent gangster; Saqib, an errand boy, is eventually trusted to lead his boss’s new farming venture, where he becomes determined to rise above his rank by any means necessary.
Saqib’s boss, the wealthy landowner Hisham, reminisces about meeting his wife while she was dating his brother while Gazala, a young teacher, falls for Saqib and his bold promises for their future before learning about his plans to skim money from the farm’s profits.
Moving from Pakistan’s sophisticated cities to its most rural farmlands, This Is Where the Serpent Lives captures the extraordinary proximity of extreme wealth to extreme poverty in a land where fate is determined by class and social station.
Transcription
Ben Lerner
A writer returns to his college town, where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety-year-old mentor.
But after he drops his smartphone in the hotel sink, he arrives at Thomas’s house with no recording device – a fact he is mysteriously unable to confess.
What unfolds from this dreamlike circumstance is both a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich and impoverish our connections to each other, that store and obliterate our memories, and a moving exploration of the relationships that make us who we are.
Uprising
Tahmima Anam
On a desolate, sinking island, a group of children witness their mothers living lives of cruelty and servitude. Bought and sold by Amma, the sadistic madam who was once herself sold into slavery, the women have learned to accept their fate. Yet their children weave fantastic tales of escape, imagining that someday they will leave the island and enjoy a life of freedom.
When Kusum Khan, a young, educated woman from the city, is forcibly brought to the island, she too is subjected to Amma’s violent induction. Yet Kusum refuses to yield, and soon the collective complacency of her fellow prisoners turns into a ferocity and defiance.
Together, they begin a rebellion that will upend their island, their world and the very order of things.