The Booker Prize shortlist for 2025 has just been announced. This year’s eclectic judging panel includes Sex and the City actor Sarah Jessica Parker, Booker Prize-longlisted novelist Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, literary critic Chris Power and Booker Prize-longlisted author Kiley Reid, with Irish novelist and dramatist Roddy Doyle chairing the panel. Parker described the process of whittling down the 13-strong longlist to just six tomes as “real agony”.
Unlike previous years, the six novels are all penned by established authors, from previous winner Kiran Desai to twice-nominated Andrew Miller. The shortlist is filled out by Susan Choi, Katie Kitamura and Ben Markovits. However, my favourite of the shortlist comes from a previous Booker nominee, David Szalay.
Sharing themes of family, identity, loneliness and history, as well as migration and class, Doyle said: “All of the books, in six different and very fresh ways, find their stories in the examination of the individual trying to live with – to love, to seek attention from, to cope with, to understand, to keep at bay, to tolerate, to escape from – other people.”
Susan Choi’s Flashlight (£11.19, Amazon.co.uk) is a century and continent-jumping novel that explores the mystery of a father drowning, while Ben Markovits’ The Rest of Our Lives (£15.18, Amazon.co.uk) follows a middle-aged man who leaves his home and marriage for a solo road trip. Booker-winner Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (£18.09, Amazon.co.uk) is a 650-page epic that sees two Indian writers who have emigrated to the US reconnecting on an overnight train.
American author Katie Kitamura’s novel Audition (£14.75, Amazon.co.uk) is about an actress who encounters a man claiming to be her son, while British writer Andrew Miller’s book, The Land in Winter (£15.99, Amazon.co.uk), follows two couples –including two pregnant women– who are neighbours and find their lives unravavelling one night in a violent blizzard.
But while all the shortlisted books promise engrossing immersion in other worlds and characters, it’s David Szalay’s novel Flesh that absorbed me most this past summer. Following a stoic man from boyhood to the end of his life, it takes the reader from Hungary to London as the protagonist transcends class, falls in and out of relationships and battles his psychological isolation. Just like the character, the writing is unemotive and sparing, but somehow leaves you emotionally bereft when you finish it.
The jury’s out for who will win the Booker 2025, but I’m making a case for David Szalay’s Flesh.
Discover more of the best books of 2025, including Booker longlisted reads
