McBride's "The Good Lord Bird", about the journey of a young slave in the 1850s trumped Lahiri's tale of two brothers set in Kolkata of the 1960s.
Lahiri who lives in Brooklyn and the daughter of immigrant Bengali parents had recently lost out on the Booker Prize for the same novel "Lowland." The author had won the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Hemingway Award for her debut collection of stories, "Interpreter of Maladies".
The annual awards, presented by the National Book Foundation, honour American authors for published works over the past year in fiction, nonfiction, poetry and young people's literature.
The winners of 64th National Book Awards were announced at a ceremony in Manhattan on Wednesday evening.
Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison presented the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community to Maya Angelou.