This extraordinary history of modern Afghanistan is told from the inside-out, through the lives of everyday workers at a landmark hotel. Foreign correspondent Lyse Doucet relays the hopes, dreams, joys, and griefs of ordinary people trying to endure forces beyond their control. That Afghans do so with dignity, dark humour, and an abiding faith in hospitality—despite the increasingly inhospitable conditions of their homeland—is a testament to human grace. The Finest Hotel in Kabul is a quiet masterpiece of literary nonfiction. It is one of those rare books written out of deep love and an unwavering commitment to complexity. After decades of building trust and listening closely, Doucet brings to vivid, complicated life a place that otherwise risks being a news headline at best, at worst an abstraction.

— Kate Harris Author and this year's Nonfiction judge

Marc Bendavid’s The Sapling is so beautifully done. Its assemblage of material and then its arrangement are outstanding. This book shows us how a writer can use the beauty and form of a question to gather, form, build, come back to, imagine, to live with and grieve in. I loved how unconcerned it was with noise and how confident it was in its quiet.

— Souvankham Thammavongsa Poet, novelist, and this year's Literary Fiction judge

We Used To Live Here is not the book that you think it's going to be. It manages to talk its way across the threshold by convincing you that you're in for a haunted house story, and you see the telltale signs of the book you are expecting everywhere at first, in every weird insect and spooky child and veiled reference to buried familial trauma. But as the book progresses through the main storyline as well as the abundant supplementary materials (emails, real estate listings, news clippings, transcripts) it unfolds itself into something richer, much more complex, and more deeply scary than an angry poltergeist. Early on in the book, a character mentions offhandedly that the basement is much bigger than the footprint of the house above, which becomes an incredibly apt metaphor for the story itself as it opens up into something much bigger than the pages can hold, with doorways into other stories that we only glimpse eerie flickers of. The flawed, deeply anxious narrator is as good a guide as any wildly swinging compass: unreliable unless you are standing in the middle of a genuine anomaly. We Used To Live Here is captivating, with an emphasis on "captive," and proves extremely difficult to escape.

— Natalie Zina Walschots Novelist and this year's Speculative Fiction judge