Schlocko's Pulitzer Fiction Predictions for 2019

Who needs Superbowl squares or NCAA Tournament brackets? Every year I hope to read the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction before the award is announced in April, and the past couple of years I've managed to do it with the help of a website called pprize.com which has a pretty good track record of picking the victor. But . . . where's the fun in that? Below is a list of books I think are likely to take the prize in 2019, based on my own reading, the buzz among litgeeks, and the Pulitzer Committee's predilection for epics, immigrant narratives, and meditations on mortality. (Although there was the welcome comic anomaly of "Less" last year, plus, we seem to be living in The Golden Age Of First Nations Literature, so maybe the good people at Columbia will focus their attention on our home-grown oppressed population.)