Rosa Rankin-Gee follows her 2021 near-future climate-crisis dystopia, Dreamland, with a similar but more politically focused work. As I read My Only Boy, I kept having to remind myself that the nation it describes is not (yet) real, because, for a reader living abroad, the novel’s England seems unnervingly close to what might come next. Any political dystopia risks being overtaken by reality, but in this case the gap between truth and fiction feels claustrophobic.

At the beginning of the novel, Elle is at a party held to mourn that day’s election of a far-right populist government. She’s the communications director for the almost too brilliantly named Gigr, a company connecting people seeking immediate shift work with businesses offering it. Elle is freshly upset by witnessing and immediately containing the reputational damage of a worker’s jump from a balcony. She knows how to do this, because “we’d had a death every four weeks, then every three weeks, then every two”: exhausted, starving people taking underpaid shifts from Gigr after finishing public sector jobs that no longer pay enough for survival. Almost everyone, in this slightly more desperate, divided and unfair nation, ends up doing some work for Gigr sooner or later, to buy faster access to emergency healthcare or food for crisis-stricken family, and Gigr has algorithms to ensure that each person is paid the least their particular circumstances oblige them to accept.

Meanwhile, summers are hotter and more dangerous, air and water dirtier, rain harder and stranger. The rich are richer while everyone else’s lives are nastier, more brutish and shorter, and the resulting desperation shows up in parties and violent crime. And Elle, who has been sure of her lesbianism since her teens, meets Ed, who has just published a gay love story to overnight success, and is now the poster boy for threatened LGBTQ+ human rights. They have a sad, sharp, flirty conversation about the politics of despair, and Ed invites Elle back to his borrowed flat to “put some Wagner on and stare into the incoming meteor”. Instead, there is a first experience of heterosexuality for both of them, and the beginning of a confusing romance.

The twin engines of the plot are romance and corporate/government corruption, entangled when Elle begins an affair with a much younger colleague while living with Ed. The entanglement generates some necessary jeopardy in a story where it’s plain from the outset that things will only get worse. Since Elle is Luisa’s boss as well as her senior, the affair makes Elle’s choices even harder to defend. Part of her pleasure in sex with Luisa is the use, bordering on abuse, of power, Luisa habitually so sarcastic that verbal consent is hard to judge. Though she pays bills for her naive, elderly parents, Elle struggles to tolerate spending time with them. We see her justify steadily more outrageous violations of labour law and human rights, her bleak frankness not wholly redeeming. Rankin-Gee walks a fine line between asking readers to spend 450 pages with an unlikable but understandable narrator, and with a loathsome one.

The great majority of the writing is first-person narrative from Elle’s point of view, a perhaps necessary choice since it is her voice that needs to win and hold the reader’s forbearance. Mine flagged in the final third, where it began to feel as if the darkness and humour risked cancelling each other out and I couldn’t care quite as much as the book asks about the intricacies of white-collar crime. There are a few brief sections told in the third person from Ed’s point of view, not revelatory and tending to feel like a convenient way to reconcile the advantages of a first-person perspective with the usefulness of another narrative technique.

Everyone in this story is clever and brittle and flippant, and the writing offers exactly those pleasures. Ed’s visiting American friend Brad remarks that “I was expecting 1930s Germany but really it’s like 1890s Russia” and Elle’s friend Flo, deep in a literature PhD and (of course) an affair with her married supervisor, responds “That must be so nice … to have a sense of history”: writing so wry that it’s hard to see the fulcrum of the joke. Elle’s circle of friends and (ex-)lovers are all surviving on wisecracks, alcohol and threadbare repression. It makes for cynically funny if unvarying writing, and an unexpected last-minute turn towards greater warmth isn’t wholly convincing.

Rabih Alameddine has won the National book award for fiction for The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother), a darkly comic saga spanning six decades in the life of a Lebanese family.

The novel, which traverses a sprawling history of Lebanon including its civil war and economic collapse, is told through the eyes of its titular protagonist: a gay 63-year-old philosophy teacher confronting his past and his relationship with his mother and his homeland.

True to his irreverent style, Alameddine, on stage, thanked his psychiatrist, his gastrointestinal doctors and his drug dealers. “I shouldn’t say more about that,” he cracked.

Elsewhere in his acceptance speech, Alameddine reckoned with crises in both Gaza and the US.

“This morning I saw two videos,” he said. “One was of an ICE agent. The woman was on the asphalt, zip-tied. He came over and zapped her, and then carried her like garbage and threw her in the back of the SUV.”

The second video, he continued, showed “a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon that was bombed and 12 people died. And I kept thinking: they make a desolation and call it a ceasefire. Sometimes, as writers, we have to say: enough.”

Alameddine’s speech on Wednesday night capped off a ceremony filled with politically potent victories. Many winners – like those in the past two years – used their speeches to reflect on the role of literature in the face of global tragedy.

“It’s very difficult to think in celebratory terms about a book that was written in response to a genocide,” said Omar El Akkad, who won the nonfiction prize for One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. The Egyptian-Canadian author’s book is a treatise on the western response to Israel’s war on Gaza.

“It’s difficult to think in celebratory terms when I have spent two years seeing what shrapnel does to a child’s body,” he said. “When I know my tax money is doing this, and that many of my elected representatives happily support it.”

El Akkad was one of three winners recognized by the first time by the National book award. Each of the five categories came with a $10,000 prize.

The translated literature award went to We Are Green and Trembling by the Argentinian writer and first-time nominee Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, translated from Spanish by Robin Myers.

“I’m gonna speak in Spanish because there are fascists who don’t like that,” Cabezón Cámara said to uproarious applause.

Another first-time nominee, Daniel Nayeri, won the young people’s literature award for The Teacher of Nomad Land, the story of two orphaned Iranian siblings in the second world war.

The poetry prize went to Patricia Smith for The Intentions of Thunder, a collection centered around the beauty and brutality of the Black experience in the US. She had previously been a poetry finalist in 2008 for her book Blood Dazzler.

The ceremony, which took place at Cipriani Wall Street and featured a performance from Corinne Bailey Rae, also included the presentation of two previously announced lifetime achievement awards to Roxane Gay and George Saunders.

Saunders, in a galvanising speech, called on the power of writing to dispel the myth of absolute power. “Bullies, autocrats, zealots … they always know. They’re completely sure,” he said.

“But we artists … have an advantage over autocrats because [we’re] in that not-knowing state. This puts us in a less delusional relationship with reality. And the less delusion, the less suffering we cause.”