Fiction by Edwidge Danticat, Valeria Luiselli and Karl Ove Knausgaard are among this year’s finalists for the National Book Awards, with many of the books taking on such contentious issues as gender identity, criminal justice and the Middle East.

Tuesday’s announcement by the National Book Foundation of five nominees in each of five competitive categories has at least one notable omission: Macalester professor-emeritus Marlon James’ “The Disappearers,” a Booker Prize finalist praised by the New York Times as among the century’s best releases. James’ novel, centered around the vicious beating of a group of gay men in Jamaica in the 1980s, had been on the National Book Awards fiction longlist of 10 released last month.

Winners, each of whom receive $10,000, will be revealed during a Nov. 18 dinner ceremony in Manhattan. Honorary medals will be presented to Salman Rushdie and Perri Klass.

Danticat’s “Dèy” and Luiselli’s “Beginning Middle End” are fiction finalists in a category of wide-ranging characters, subjects and locations. Danticat’s story of a mass shooting attack and its aftermath takes place in Miami, Haiti and Brooklyn, while Hannah Lillith Assadi’s “Paradiso 17” follows the worldwide journey of an exiled Palestinian. Luiselli’s family narrative spans generations and continents and Julián Delgado Lopera’s “Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You” is set in Colombia. In Morgan Thomas’ “Mad Eden,” a transgender healthcare worker in Florida struggles for stability in an unfriendly world.