Internationally recognised art and literary critic, writer and cultural producer. Published in ELLE, Glamour, Esquire and Cosmopolitan; member of the Union of Writers.
Every year, the Booker Prize longlist offers a map of where the English-language novel is right now and, perhaps, where it’s headed. The 2025 selection is no exception. After reading 153 novels, a panel chaired by author Roddy Doyle has delivered a list of 13 books that feels unusually global and stylistically diverse, balancing the quiet and the epic, the familiar and the formally daring.
The judges seem to have curated this list like a museum exhibition, assembling works that speak to each other about a world grappling with history, identity, and displacement. There are stories set in nine different countries, from a struggling farm in Malaysia to the bitter cold of England’s worst winter. It’s a list that rewards both sustained, decades-long careers and the sudden arrival of new voices.
If you’re wondering where to begin, here’s a look at the books vying for one of literature’s most significant awards.
The Heavyweights and Returning Contenders
It has been nearly twenty years since Kiran Desai won the Booker for The Inheritance of Loss. She returns with The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, an almost 700-page novel about two young Indian writers navigating love, family, and the feeling of being an outsider in America. It’s a vast, immersive social novel that seems destined to be a central part of the conversation.
David Szalay and Andrew Miller, both previously shortlisted, are back as well. Szalay’s Flesh is a spare, haunting portrait of a Hungarian man whose life is shaped by forces beyond his control. What’s most striking is what Szalay withholds; by refusing to grant us easy access to his protagonist’s inner life, he creates a powerful story about alienation. Miller’s The Land in Winter is an atmospheric novel set during the brutal British winter of 1962. It uses the claustrophobia of a nation frozen in place to explore the hidden tensions within two marriages, capturing the chill of a country on the verge of immense social change.
Debuts That Demand Attention
Of course, the list also makes room for new talent. Two debut novelists are included this year, and both offer formally inventive responses to contemporary crises.
Canadian-Ukrainian author Maria Reva’s Endling begins as a dark comedy about a scientist hunting for endangered snails in Ukraine to fund her work. But when the full-scale Russian invasion begins, the book fractures, becoming a wild, angry, and deeply moving examination of what it means to tell stories in a time of war. Ledia Xhoga’s Misinterpretation follows an Albanian interpreter in New York whose life begins to unravel as she becomes entangled with a Kosovar torture survivor. The novel cleverly uses the gaps and failures of translation to explore the space between compassion and self-preservation.
Novels of Scope and Intimacy
Several books on the list use a large canvas to trace the lines of history and family. Tash Aw’s The South is the first in a planned quartet about two boys falling in love in rural Malaysia as their world changes around them. Susan Choi’s Flashlight is a multi-generational saga exploring the tangled roots of a family with ties to Korea, Japan, and the United States.
Others find their power in a much tighter focus. Katie Kitamura’s Audition is an enigmatic psychological novel about an actress who meets a young man claiming to be her son, blurring the lines between performance and identity. In The Rest of Our Lives, Ben Markovits turns a father’s road trip after dropping his daughter at college into a quiet, unsparing look at a marriage’s end.
Rounding out the list are novels that are deeply rooted in a specific place and time, from the salt-sprayed coast of Northern England in Benjamin Wood’s Seascraper to the hushed, philosophical world of a small Greek island in Jonathan Buckley’s One Boat. Each book, in its own way, asks what it means to be alive in our fractured present. The only question now is which one to read first.
