A Guide to the 2025 Booker Prize Shortlist

An exploration of contemporary European masculinity, Flesh follows Hungarian teenager István from his home in a housing estate to middle age. Living with his mother, his only companion is his neighbour, a married woman close to his mother’s age, with whom he enters into an affair which he barely understands. We see István passively drift through the world through author David Szalay’s sparse, decidedly unfleshy prose, creating a reality that’s both bleak and compelling. 

The novel’s title refers to the way István—and on a wider scale, the working class—is both portrayed to the reader and perceived by those around them; we’re deprived of his inner world and privy only to his scant external voicings that would make John Wick seem positively verbose.

About the author: British-Hungarian writer and novelist David Szalay was born in Montreal, Canada and spent his childhood in Beirut and London before studying at the University of Oxford. His short story collection All That Man Is, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2016, with the collection similarly exploring the nature of contemporary European masculinity.

The impetus for Flashlight began with a short story published in The New Yorker, charting a standoff between a young girl and a psychologist following the drowning of the former’s father in Japan. This confrontation forms the prologue for Flashlight, a bold novel that charts the aftermath of a family tragedy, spanning decades and weaving across the post-war Korean immigrant community in Japan to suburban America, and the North Korean regime.

About the author: American novelist Susan Choi has authored six novels, with her debut The Foreign Student, winning the Asian-American Literary Award for Fiction. She was born in South Bend, Indiana, and is of Korean and Jewish heritage.

Subtle psychological warfare ensues in Audition, which centres on an accomplished actress whose neatly crafted world threatens to fall apart when a young man claims to be her son. Told in two parts, each with an equally unreliable narrator, Audition plays with the variability of existence, the inherent performativeness of everyday life, and the shadowy nature of truth. 

About the author: Katie Kitamura is an American novelist and journalist of Japanese descent who currently teaches creative writing at New York University. She has authored five novels, including Gone to the Forest, A Separation, and Intimacies, which was selected as one of the New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2021 and longlisted for the Booker Prize in the same year. She was born in Sacramento, California, and studied at Princeton University.

Middle-aged father Tom Layward stays true to his word to leave his unfaithful wife when their youngest child turns 18; dropping his daughter off at university in Pittsburgh and continuing west on something of a great American road trip. On the run from his own health issues and a forced leave of absence from work, Layward meets old friends and flames as he contemplates his past and the turns that go untaken. 

About the author: British-American author Ben Markovits grew up in Texas, Londonm and Berlin and studied at Yale University and the University of Oxford. He’s written a dozen novels, including Either Side of Winter, You Don’t Have to Live Like This, and The Sidekick, and currently teaches creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Traversing India and America, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny follows two young Indian writers—a novelist and a journalist—across both countries. Initially driven apart by the awkwardness of an unsuccessful attempt at an arranged marriage, the two begin a tentative friendship which evolves into a panoramic exploration of intimacy and creativity. Simultaneously vast and microcosmic, the novel explores the push and pull between India and the west and tradition and modernity. 

About the author: Kiran Desai is an Indian novelist, best known for the Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard and The Inheritance of Loss, the latter of which won the Booker Prize in 2006. She was born in New Delhi, India and studied creative writing at Bennington College, Hollins University, and Columbia University before settling in New York. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is her first novel in 19 years.

Taking place during the United Kingdom’s ‘Big Freeze’ of 1962-63, The Land of Winter follows two couples living in the south-west of England: village doctor Eric and his pregnant wife Irene, and farmer Bill and his wife Rita, a former dancer who also happens to be pregnant. 

Despite Irene and Rita serving as the protagonists in The Land of Winter, they’re both afflicted by a sense of passivity and a lack of agency, with events in their lives appearing to happen to, rather than by, them. As the snow begins to fall, friendships form and relationships quiver with an intensity brought on by geographic and emotional isolation. 

About the author: British author Andrew Miller was born in Bristol and studied at Middlesex Polytechnic, Lancaster University, and the University of East Anglia. He has written ten books, with his debut novel Ingenious Pain winning the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1997 and his novel Oxygen shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2001.