The annual Booker Prize longlist announcement is every avid reader’s chance to race through as many nominations as possible before the winner is announced in November. It’s not impossible, but certainly a challenge.
This year’s Booker Dozen comprises 13 books, selected by a panel chaired by critically acclaimed writer and 1993 Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle.
The remainder of the panel comprises Booker Prize-longlisted novelist Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀; actor, producer and publisher Sarah Jessica Parker; writer, broadcaster and literary critic Chris Power; and New York Times bestselling and Booker Prize-longlisted author Kiley Reid.
The requirements? All longlisted books must be long-form fiction written in English, though the writer can be of any nationality. The novel must also have been published in the UK or Ireland between October 1, 2024, and September 30, 2025.
Unlike previous years, 2025’s longlist features seven women and six men from all kinds of backgrounds – ranging from Albanian-American to Hungarian-British and Trinidadian-British.
The novels themselves, too, take readers on a fascinating journey across the globe, throughout space and time.
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Flesh by David Szalay is a bildungsroman that begins with a fifteen-year-old, his mother, and a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. Sunsan Choi’s Flashlight is a thrilling, genre-defying yarn which splices past and present to shed light on post-colonial Japanese, Korean and American identities.
The South, by Tash Aw, is about a blooming love between two boys in rural Malaysia, and is the first book in a proposed quartet. This feels rather fitting, given the literary zeitgeist seems to be shifting back towards a desire for multi-part series with winding, decade-spanning and endlessly fascinating narrative threads.
For almost 50 years, the Booker Prize has shaped the canonicity of novels, yet its influence seems to have come leaps and bounds in the last year alone. 2024’s winner, Orbital by Samantha Harvey, sold over 20,000 print copies in the UK in the week following its win on 12 November 2024, making it the fastest-selling winner of the Booker Prize since records began.
Without further ado, scroll on for summaries of all the novels longlisted for 2025’s Booker Prize.
Love Forms by Caire Adam
In 1980, 16-year-old Dawn Bishop travelled from Trinidad to Venezuela, where she gave birth to a baby girl whom she left in the care of nuns. Dawn moves to England and begins a new life; one with all the tenets of traditional success – marriage, a career, two sons, a divorce – but she thinks always of the child she had in Venezuela. So, what happens when an internet forum brings forth a woman, claiming potentially be Dawn’s long-lost daughter?
Buy now £13.19, Amazon
The South by Tash Aw
The proposed beginning of an epic quartet, Tash Aw’s The South is a bildungsroman which follows the blooming love between two boys in rural Malaysia, 1997.
It begins with a boy named Jay, forced to travel south with his family after the death of his grandfather. Their destination is a derelict farm, left to them by the late patriarch. Jay must work the Godot-esque landscape – filled with diseased trees and starved by drought. As one languorous day bleeds into the next, Jay is drawn to the farm manager’s son, Chuan, and their bond intensifies.
Buy now £9.99, Amazon
Universality by Natasha Brown
An examination of the very concept of universal truth, Natasha Brown’s satirical and deeply political novel is an exhilarating journey through the importance of language and how we use it.
The story follows a young journalist on a mission to uncover the mystery surrounding the brutal death of a man in Yorkshire, the leader of a group of anarchists who has been bludgeoned with a solid gold bar. Though she solves the mystery involving a money-hungry landlord, a columnist, and a group of radical hippies, the resulting viral longread exposé proves far more contentious than she could’ve ever imagined.
Don’t be fooled – this isn’t a murder mystery yarn. Rather, it’s a thrilling examination of class identity, modern media and contemporary British society.
Buy now £11.85, Amazon
One Boat by Jonathan Buckley
Suspended between space and time while dealing with life and death, One Boat’s protagonist Teresa straddles the veil despite being situated on a small Grecian island.
It’s the island she visited following the death of her mother nine years ago, and one she’s revisiting after losing her father. Soon enough, Teresa encounters some of the people she met almost a decade prior. Their conversations are fascinatingly honest, languorous, insightful, sweet and comforting.
Theresa soon discovers that the passage of time, suddenly, no longer feels so terrifying.
Buy now £10.79, Amazon
Flashlight by Susan Choi
Susan Choi returns with a rich, multi‑generational literary saga. When Louisa is found unconscious on a Japanese beach in 1978 and her father Serk, a Korean émigré, vanished, what seems like a tragic accident becomes a fracturing mystery.
The story spans decades and continents - from Japan to the US, Europe, and even North Korea -unspooling secrets about identity, geopolitics and grief.
Choi intertwines private trauma with broader historical legacies with laser-focused precision and emotional gravity. A novel luminous with metaphor, suspense, and the ache of inheritance.
Buy now £16.85, Amazon
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai
Kiran Desai’s long-awaited first novel in nearly twenty years follows two Indian protagonists - Sonia, an aspiring writer studying in Vermont, and Sunny, a journalist in New York - each overwhelmed by solitude abroad.
After a disastrous matchmaking attempt by their families in India, they remain apart, haunted by cultural dislocation and emotional distance. Sonia becomes entwined in a troubling affair with an older artist; Sunny grapples with unacknowledged love and racial isolation.
A sweeping, multi‑generational love story and social novel about home, class, art and the internal geography of longing.
Buy now £19.65, Amazon
Audition by Katie Kitamura
Set in present-day NYC, a celebrated actress rehearsing a new play accepts a lunch invitation from Xavier, a young man who claims to be her son.
Their rather ambiguous encounter sets in motion a shifting emotional terrain, where truth, projection and memory collide. It’s been described as a taut, thrilling reflection on the characters we all play from lover to parent to stranger, inviting readers to question how identity, family and performance blur the line of truth.
Buy now £14.45, Amazon
The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits
Late summer, Cape Cod and cross-country highways.
Tom Layward, a law professor in his mid-fifties, drops his daughter at college and, instead of returning home, he begins a solo drive out West, haunted by a marriage he’s long planned to leave.
As he journeys through old towns and motels, memory and regret mix with newfound clarity; years of emotional distance, domestic promise turned stale, and a man forced to confront what remains of his life now that the children have departed.
A moving road novel, gentle but unsparing. The Rest of Our Lives turns midlife doubt into a poignant, deeply observed reckoning.
Buy now £13.19, Amazon
The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller
December 1962, rural West Country. In Britain’s infamous Big Freeze, two neighbouring couples – Doctor Eric Parry and his wife Irene; farmer Bill Simmons and former dancer Rita – are stranded by snow as pregnancy, secrets, and simmering tensions come to the surface.
Drifting between domestic isolation and growing connection, Irene and Rita strike an unlikely bond amid claustrophobic weather and community exile.
As icy drifts deepen and memories of war linger, this novel uses winter as a metaphor, where relationships crack, hope flickers, and ordinary lives are transformed by necessity and emotional thaw.
Buy now £10.11, Amazon
Endling by Maria Reva
Ukraine, present day. Yeva, a determined biologist, is on a mission. She traverses Ukraine in a camper van collecting endangered snails, each possibly the very last of its species. To fund her work, she reluctantly joins forces with a dubious romance tour agency, crossing paths with two sisters plotting a feminist heist to expose mail-order bride exploitation. It’s a daring debut that marries rather uncanny dark humour, a genre-bending structure and a deep moral intensity.
Buy now £17.57, Amazon
Flesh by David Szalay
István is a socially awkward teen in Hungary, is drawn into an exploitative relationship that scars him. From juvenile detention, he moves on to serve in Iraq and later navigates adulthood as a conflicted security guard in Chelsea. His life is a slow-motion drift, punctuated by trauma, luck, and an affair that reshapes his fate.
Szalay’s captivating, often devastating bildungsroman offers a study of modern masculinity, longing, and human connection in the face of alienation. It’s a stark, haunting portrait of a man shaped by flesh and endurance.
Buy now £14.75, Amazon
Seascraper by Benjamin Wood
Northern England, 1960s. Thomas Flett is a shrimp gatherer (“shanker”) scraping a living from longshore sands near his coastal town. He yearns to be a musician but feels trapped by class, family duty, and tragic secrets tied to his absentee father.
But one day, he meets Edgar Acheson, a charismatic American filmmaker scouting the dunes for his next project. Edgar offers Thomas a glimpse of a different life, a wild ambition wrapped in Hollywood illusion. Thomas imagines escape, even as reality tugs him back to the sea.
Lyrical, emotionally charged, Seascraper is beautifully gripping as it explores the weight of a young person's dreams against the indelible pull of home.
Buy now £13.50, Amazon
Misinterpretation by Ledia Xhoga
Set in contemporary New York, an Albanian interpreter reluctantly agrees to assist in therapy sessions for Alfred, a Kosovar man processing the trauma of torture. Their sessions are tense, emotionally charged and far more demanding than she expects. As the pressure builds, her grip on both her marriage and mental well-being begins to slip. With little warning, she finds herself boarding a flight back to Albania, seeking her mother in a moment of desperate, uncertain escape.
Buy now £10.99, Waterstones
