The Whiting Foundation and Slate Book Review have teamed up on a campaign called “We Second That” in an effort to honor and draw attention to the best “under-recognized” second novels of the last five years.

The current panel includes novelists Yiyun Li and Colson Whitehead, independent bookseller Sarah McNally, newyorker.com editor Sasha Weiss, and Slate culture editor Dan Kois, who announced the five winning novels at the David Weeks Studio in New York.

Yiyun Li chose At Night We Walk in Circles by Daniel Alarcon; Colson Whitehead selected Family Life by Akhil Sharma; Sarah McNally chose The Book of Night Women by Marlon James; and Sasha Weiss chose Inferno by Eileen Myles. Read the judges’ essays about their picks at Slate.

According to Publishers Weekly, the idea for recognizing authors’ second novels materialized when Kois noticed a tweet from novelist Porochista Khakpour "bemoaning how often [second novels] are overlooked” and contacted Courtney Hodell, director of the Whiting Writer’s Awards to discuss ways to redress the issue.

“Our trustees loved the idea,” Hodell said. “Whiting helps writers at [the] start of [a] career, and struggling with indifferent media, a crowded marketplace, and stretched-thin publishers—as many second novelists do—is definitely an emerging-writer issue. We want to make [it] possible for people to have long, rich, careers, and if they stall out at the second novel, that might never happen.”