July 14, 2025

 

Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation
Announces Finalists for 2025 Book Awards

For two decades the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation has elevated the power of the written word to foster understanding, reconciliation, empathy, and peace. The work of this prize allows readers to step into lives and experiences vastly different from their own.

For the 20th year in a row, six finalists have been named in both fiction and nonfiction!

The DLPP is so grateful to our First Readers who provide our first round of judging—needless to say, a monumental task. For 2025 it took 95 DLPP First Readers to get this job done. Our First Readers are tasked to determine that books are of notable literary quality, possess the ability to be of enduring value, and will connect with a wide-ranging audience.

We encourage you to fill your summer reading list with our finalist lists. And we encourage you to share this announcement with others who may not be familiar with the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

Mark your calendars now for our awards gala weekend—November 8 and 9, 2025.

All the very best, and peace, to you—

Our Fiction Finalists

Black Butterflies 
(Alfred A. Knopf)

A novel of resilience and hope set in Sarajevo, 1992. Each night, nationalist gangs erect barricades, splitting the city into ethnic enclaves. Each morning, the locals—whether Bosniak, Croat, or Serb—push them aside. When violence finally erupts, Zora, an artist and teacher, sends her family away to safety. She stays behind, reluctant to believe that hostilities will last. As the city falls under siege, her home is laid to waste, yet Zora finds ways to rebuild, over and over.

Freedom is a Feast 
(Little, Brown and Company)

In 1964, young rebel Stanislavo joins the leftist movement in the jungles of Venezuela. There, he meets Emiliana, a nurse and fellow revolutionary. Their budding romance is upended by a decision with consequences that echo across generations. Decades later, on the eve of the attempted coup against President Chávez, María, a single mother, encounters Stanislavo after her son is wounded by a stray bullet—a twist of fate that gives Stanislavo one final chance to atone before it’s too late.

James 
(Penguin Random House, Doubleday)

A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and darkly humorous, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view. Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a literary icon, this brilliant and tender novel radically illuminates Jim’s agency, intelligence, and compassion as never before. James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first century American literature.

Martyr! 
(Alfred A. Knopf, Penguin Random House US)

A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original, Martyr! heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary fiction.

The Good Deed 
(Red Hen Press)

Set in 2018 against the backdrop of an overcrowded, fetid refugee camp on the beautiful Greek island of Samos, The Good Deed follows the stories of four women living in the camp and an American tourist who comes to Samos to escape her own dark secret.

 

When the tourist does a 'good deed,' she triggers a crisis that brings her and the refugee women into a conflict that escalates dramatically as each character struggles for what she needs.

The Women: A Novel 
(St. Martin's Publishing Group)

The Women is the story of one woman gone to war, but it shines a light on all women who put themselves in harm’s way and whose sacrifice and commitment to their country have too often been forgotten. A novel about deep friendships and bold patriotism, The Women is a richly drawn story with a memorable heroine whose idealism and courage under fire will come to define an era.

A Map of Future Ruins 
(Penguin Random House, Riverhead Books)

In 2021, Lauren Markham went to Greece in search of her heritage and to cover the aftermath of a fire that destroyed the largest refugee camp in Europe, for which six young Afghan refugees had been arrested. Markham soon saw that she was tracing a broader narrative: in this trailblazing synthesis of reporting, history, myth, memoir, and essay, she helps us see that the stories we tell about migration don’t just explain what happened. They predict the future.

John Lewis 
(Simon & Schuster)

Born into poverty in rural Alabama, John Lewis rose to prominence in the civil rights movement, becoming second only to Martin Luther King, Jr. in his contributions. David Greenberg’s “authoritative…definitive biography” (David J. Garrow, Pulitzer Prize–winning author) follows Lewis’s journey beyond the civil rights era through a narrative that weaves together exclusive interviews, never-before-seen FBI files, and documents, offering profound insights into his significant role in American history and the civil rights movement.

Nuclear War: A Scenario 
(Penguin Random House, Dutton)

Pulitzer Prize finalist Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario explores this ticking-clock scenario, based on dozens of exclusive new interviews with military and civilian experts who have built the weapons, have been privy to the response plans, and have been responsible for those decisions should they have needed to be made. Nuclear War: A Scenario examines the handful of minutes after a nuclear missile launch. It is essential reading, and unlike any other book in its depth and urgency.

Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea
 (Pantheon Books, Penguin Random House)

In Solidarity, two renowned organizers and activists offer the first in-depth examination of the concept, surveying its past, present, and future across borders of nation, identity, and class. They ask how we might build solidarity in an era of staggering inequality, polarization, violence, and ecological catastrophe and insist that, both as a principle and a practice, it must be cultivated and institutionalized, so that care for the common good becomes the central aim of politics and social life.

The Burning Earth 
(W. W. Norton & Company)

 

In The Burning Earth, historian Sunil Amrith relates in gorgeous prose how the imperial, globe-spanning pursuit of profit, joined with new forms of energy and new possibilities of freedom from hunger and discomfort, freedom to move and explore, has brought change to every inch of the Earth. Amrith has written a mind-altering epic—vibrant with stories, characters, and vivid images—in which humanity might find the collective wisdom to save itself.

The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora 
(Liveright Publishing)

Based on hundreds of interviews conducted across more than a decade, The Home I Worked to Make shares stories of leaving, losing, searching, and finding (or not finding) home for Syrians dispersed by war. Across this tapestry of voices, a new understanding emerges: home, for those without the privilege of taking it for granted, is both struggle and achievement. 

If you would like to purchase copies of the books, please consider purchasing them through Bookshop.org.

Please consider a gift to the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation.