2016 Pen Awards for Debut Novels

Ifi and Job, a Nigerian couple in an arranged marriage, begin their lives together in Nebraska with a single, outrageous lie: that Job is a doctor, not a college dropout. Unwittingly, Ifi becomes his co-conspirator—that is until his first wife, Cheryl, whom he married for a green card years ago, reenters the picture and upsets Job's tenuous balancing act.

• Winner of the 2016 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
• Winner of the 2015 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
• Winner of the 2015-2016 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature (Adult Fiction)
• Finalist for the 2016 Edgar Award for Best First Novel
• Finalist for the 2015 Los Angeles Times Book Prize (Mystery/Thriller)
• Nominated for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction
• One of the New York Times' 100 Notable Books of 2015
• Named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Seattle Times, Kansas City Star, Orlando Weekly, Daily Beast, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Guardian, National Post, MPR News, Amazon, Slate, Flavorwire, Entropy, Quartz, and Globe and Mail

From a quiet family farm in Montana in the 60s to the grit and haze of San Francisco in the 70s to a gypsy-populated, post-war Saigon, The Given World spins around its unconventional and unforgettable heroine, Riley. When her big brother is declared MIA in Vietnam, young Riley packs up her shattered heart and leaves her family, her first love, and “a few small things” behind. By trial and error she builds a new life, working on cars, delivering newspapers, tending bar. She befriends, rescues, and is rescued by a similarly vagabond cast of characters whose “‘unraveled souls’ sting hardest and linger the longest.” (The New York Times Book Review) Foolhardy, funny, and wise, Riley’s challenge as she grows into a woman is simple: survive long enough to go home again, or at least figure out where home is, and who might be among the living there.

Jessica Lee Richardson’s debut collection It Had Been Planned and There Were Guidesteems with double magic—families of spiders, monsters in triplicate, and panels of bleacher-sitting grandfathers (who live in a diaphragm!) cohabitate with a starker, more familiar kind of strange in a hyper real and living tapestry of teenage porn stars, lovelorn factory workers, and art world auctioneers. From a woman who awakes from a short kidnapping with an unquenchable need for risk to a concrete boat ride gone off the rails, from Los Angeles to the Bronx, from the Midwest to North Korea, these stories explore the absurd in real spaces and the real in absurd spaces, seeking a way into something else entirely.

Books may be Mayumi Saito’s greatest love and her one source of true pleasure. Forty-one years old, disenchanted wife and dutiful mother, Mayumi’s work as a librarian on a small island off the coast of New England feeds her passion for reading and provides her with many occasions for wry observations on human nature, but it does little to remedy the mundanity of her days. That is, until the day she issues a library card to a shy seventeen-year-old boy and swiftly succumbs to a sexual obsession that subverts the way she sees the library, her family, the island she lives on, and ultimately herself.