Marlon James’s novel “Black Leopard, Red Wolf,” an epic fantasy about a bounty hunter on the trail of a mysterious boy, on Tuesday was named one of the five fiction finalists for the National Book Award.

James, who won the Man Booker Prize in 2015 for his novel “A Brief History of Seven Killings,” is up against two debut authors, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, for her story collection “Sabrina & Corina,” and Julia Phillips, for her novel “Disappearing Earth,” about two sisters who are lured into a stranger’s car and disappear in Russia’s remote Kamchatka Peninsula. The two others, both of them previously Pulitzer finalists, are Susan Choi, for “Trust Exercise,” and Laila Lalami, for “The Other Americans.”

The nonfiction finalists include “Solitary,” the memoir of Albert Woodfox, a man who served more than four decades in solitary confinement, and “The Yellow House,” Sarah M. Broom’s memoir of her New Orleans family and how its members were scattered after Hurricane Katrina. They will compete with Tressie McMillan Cottom’s “Thick: And Other Essays,” Carolyn Forché’s “What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance” and David Treuer’s “The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present.”

The finalists in translated literature include works originally written in Arabic, Finnish, French, Hungarian and Japanese.