Light the beacons and alert your book club — the Booker Prize 2025 shortlist has been revealed.
Whittled down from the ‘Booker dozen’ of 13 new works of fiction, this year’s judging panel included Sarah Jessica Parker. The star of stage and screen has her own literary imprint, and attended the press briefing wearing a fabulous pair of Jimmy Choo stiletto python-printed boots (first debuted in 2000, but re-issued as part of a collaboration with Connor Ives for The Archive: 1997—2001 collection).
Irish novelist Roddy Doyle is heading up the jury as the chair of judges, with the panel that also includes Booker Prize-longlisted authors Ayobami Adebayo and Kiley Reid, alongside author and literary critic Chris Power.
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Doyle said he favours a traffic-light system, whereby each jury member assigns a green, amber or red tag to each book as they read to signal their level of enthusiasm to the rest of the panel. Necessary for harmonious and swift communication, perhaps, when each panellist had to start with a pile of 153 submissions.
The Booker Prize 2025 shortlist is as follows: Flashlight, by American writer Susan Choi; The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, by Indian writer Kiran Desai; Audition, by American writer Katie Kitamura; The Rest of Our Lives, by American writer Ben Markovits; The Land in Winter, by British writer Andrew Miller; and Flesh, by Hungarian-British writer David Szalay.
Shortlist statistics
Whereas as last year’s shortlist had women authors for five out of the six books, this year’s clutch is evenly split between three women and three men.
Of the six authors on 2025 shortlist, you may have noted, only one is British. There’s one Indian author and one Hungarian-British, and then three American authors. The Booker Prize controversially opened to all English language books from writers of any nationality, so long as it was published in the UK and Ireland, back in 2014 (previously it had only accepted entrants from the UK, Ireland, Commonwealth countries and Zimbabwe).
All six are very established authors with numerous literary titles under their belts. No debut novelists made it to the shortlist this year, although it is rare for this most prestigious prize to be awarded to someone’s first book (it’s happened only six or so times since 1969).
Penguin Random House dominated the 2024 shortlist, with four out of six of the novels from the publishing giant’s imprints (Flashlight, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, Audition, and Flesh) .
Independent publisher Faber has one on the shortlist — The Rest of Our Lives — but has a strong track record with seven previous Booker Prize winners on its books. Hodder & Stoughton imprint Sceptre also has a horse in the race with The Land in Winter, but has thus far only published six Booker-shortlisted novels.
Books and authors explained
Read this in order to impress at your next dinner with literary types, or to fudge your way through a conversation with book snobs. Or to pick which one to read next, of course.
Flashlight is Choi’s sixth novel and began life as a short story published in the New Yorker.
It follows 10-year-old Louisa, who has returned to the US with her American mother after Korean émigré father goes missing, presumed drowned, during a summer trip to Japan. Flashbacks to the 1970s explore a terrifying episode of history where Japanese citizens were abducted from coastal towns by North Korean operatives, a story that Choi said has haunted her since childhood.
The jury called it “one of those books that completely dominates your thoughts”.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is Desai’s third novel and has been almost 20 years in the making. Desai’s previous novel, The Inheritance of Loss, won the Booker Prize back in 2006.
Her latest book charts a romance between a journalist and a writer, both Indian immigrants to America, who reconnect following a chance encounter on a train. Desai said she was inspired to write about loneliness in all it forms, not just romantic.
“Rich in meditations about class, race and nationhood, this book has it all,” according to the jury.
Audition is Kitamura’s fifth novel. An anxious and accomplished actress meets a young man for lunch in Manhattan, and their two narratives joust to explain who they are to each other. Kitamura chose to structure her novel thusly to explore the levels of cognitive dissonance we’re currently contending with in the world.
The jury described her novel as “brilliantly tense” and said it “makes existential detectives of us all.”
The Rest of Our Lives is the twelfth novel from Markovits. A man named Tom Layward drives his 18-year-old daughter to university in Pittsburgh, then decides to just keep on driving after remembering he promised himself he would leave his cheating wife as soon as his youngest child has flown the nest.
Markovits chose to write this novel as his own children were getting older, and gave his main character the same mysterious symptoms of an illness he was also experiencing.
The jury described it thusly: “A road trip chronicle, a book about sickness, a basketball novel, a family saga, and a story about how we say goodbye.”
The Land in Winter is Miller’s tenth book. Set in winter in the west country in 1962, it pits two couples — a doctor and his wife, and the wife of a struggling dairy farmer — against a terrifying blizzard. Markovitz says the book came out of an anecdote from his mother that he couldn’t stop thinking about.
The jury said “it’s a joy to read, a nerve-shredding pleasure”.
Flesh is Szalay’s sixth novel. It begins in Hungary, where an isolated 15-year old boy István is drawn into an illicit affair with a married neighbour. Years later he lives in London as a member of the super-rich, but his wealth and desire for intimacy threatens to destroy him. Szalay said he wanted to combine his two nationalities into a book that explored cultural and economic divides.
According to the jury, this is “an absolute page-turner”.
Place your bets
Betting on the Booker Prize has been around since the Eighties, but this year the bookmakers may have missed the mark on the odds for the shortlist.
Seascraper by Benjamin Wood had odds of 5/2 before today’s announcement, but didn’t make it off the longlist. It was tied for favourite with The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, however, so that was a safe bet.
Audition, on the other hand, had some of the longest odds at 12/1, so if you took a chance there you would have won big.
What’s next for the Booker Prize 2025?
The shortlisted books have just been announced at a ceremony at the Southbank Centre, with actors Louise Brealey and Alfred Enoch reading unpublished correspondence between judges from the Booker Prize archive.
All shortlisted authors will receive a prize of £2,500 and a specially bound edition of their book — along with the international fame, recognition and boost to their sales that such an honour entails.
The Booker Prize 2025 ceremony, which crowns this year’s winner, takes place 10 November at Old Billingsgate. The winner will recieve £50,000 and the Iris trophy (named for Iris Murdoch, who won in 1978).
They can also expect to see their career take off. Last year Samantha Harvey, sold 20,000 print copies of her Booker Prize-winning book Orbital within a week of the announcement. It spent eight weeks on top of the fiction charts and publisher Vintage reprinted 250,000 copies in response to demand.
