A reader's guide to the 2025 Booker Prize Longlist

Indian Express

2 days ago

Every summer, the Booker Prize longlist offers a snapshot of the contemporary novel. This year's longlist is no exception. Spanning nine nationalities and four continents, the 13 novels that make up the 2025 'Booker Dozen' trace fault lines both personal and political across war zones, classrooms, frozen fields, city apartments, and intergenerational silences.
Selected from 153 eligible submissions, the list includes a former Booker Prize winner, two first-time novelists, and several returning names. It marks the first time a past winner has chaired the judging panel: Roddy Doyle, who won in 1993 for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, leads a group that includes novelist Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, actor and publisher Sarah Jessica Parker, critic Chris Power, and writer Kiley Reid.
The five judges will next narrow the list to a shortlist of six titles, which will be revealed at a public event at London's Royal Festival Hall on September 23. The six shortlisted authors will each receive £2,500 (approx. ₹2.7 lakh) and a specially bound edition of their book. The winner will be announced on November 10 at a ceremony at Old Billingsgate in London, broadcast live on Booker Prize channels, and awarded £50,000 (approx. ₹53.5 lakh).
Here is a closer look at the books in contention:
In her third novel, Kiran Desai follows two characters whose lives intersect on a train journey and later unfold across India and the United States. Sonia, a recent graduate of a writing program in Vermont, has returned to her family in India. Sunny, a journalist living in New York, is contending with his family's past and his mother's influence. Both are shaped by family history and by efforts to resist or accommodate expectations.
The novel moves between cities and generations, examining the emotional and material weight passed from one to the next. At around 700 words, it is the longest novel on the Booker longlist.
About the author: Desai won the Booker Prize in 2006 for The Inheritance of Loss. That novel addressed questions of migration, aspiration and belonging, themes that continue in The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. Her mother Anita Desai has been shortlisted for the award three times.
A journalist investigates the bludgeoning of a man on a Yorkshire farm and becomes entangled in the ideologies, ambitions and contradictions of those linked to the crime. The story that follows connects financial institutions, media figures and political movements. Brown's novel interrogates the language used to frame facts, the authority granted to some voices over others, and the instability of any single narrative.
This is Brown's second novel. At about 156 words, it is the shortest novel in the longlist.
About the author: Brown studied mathematics at Cambridge and worked in financial services before turning to fiction. She is chairing the International Booker Prize jury in 2026. Her debut, Assembly, was published in 2021 and widely recognised for its formal structure and controlled tone.
Following the death of his grandfather, a teenager named Jay travels with his family to a rural property in southern Malaysia. There, on land marked by drought and decay, Jay is set to work by his father and begins to form a relationship with Chuan, the son of the farm's manager.
Aw's novel is the first in a planned quartet, and situates personal relationships within broader social and economic shifts. The narrative takes place in the late 1990s, during the Asian financial crisis, and reflects on generational ties, sexuality and the pressures of inheritance.
About the author: Aw was born in Taiwan, raised in Malaysia, and educated in England. Three of his previous novels have been longlisted for the Booker Prize. He has received awards including the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.
In Misinterpretation, an interpreter living in New York begins translating therapy sessions for a man who survived torture in Kosovo. The work, which she accepts with reluctance, reopens memories of her own past and leads her into increasingly risky situations. As her professional boundaries blur, she becomes involved with a Kurdish poet and later travels to Albania to visit her mother, confronting unresolved tensions between the country she left and the one she inhabits.
About the author: Xhoga was born in Tirana, Albania and is based in Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared in various literary journals, and she is also a playwright. This is her first novel. It was previously recognised with a New York City Book Award and was a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.
Thomas lives with his mother in a coastal town in northern England, where he earns a living scraping shrimp off the beach using the methods passed down from his grandfather. He spends his days working, playing guitar, and watching the people on his street. When an outsider arrives offering visions of escape and possibility, Thomas begins to imagine a life beyond his familiar routine.
Wood's novel follows one man's inward and outward transformation as he measures personal ambition against family loyalty and local identity.
About the author: The author, who grew up in Merseyside, has published five novels. His first was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, and he is a lecturer in creative writing at King's College London.
Flesh begins with a teenager named István who lives with his mother in a housing estate in Hungary. His closest relationship is with a neighbour, a married woman whose interest in him evolves into something more complex. What begins in adolescence extends over the years into a story of economic ascent and emotional isolation. István moves through the army and eventually into the circles of the London elite, his life shaped by desires he only partly understands.
About the author: Szalay was born in Canada, raised in London, and now lives in Vienna. He has written six books of fiction and several BBC radio plays. His previous novel, All That Man Is, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2016 and won the Gordon Burn Prize.
Set in Ukraine in the early 2020s, Endling follows three women and one endangered snail as they travel across a country on the edge of war. Yeva, a biologist, supports her research by dating men who visit Ukraine through commercial romance tours. Nastia and Solomiya are also linked to the industry, though their real purpose is to find their missing mother, an activist.
Reva's novel uses a multi-threaded narrative to explore gender, science, family, and resistance in a landscape shaped by both political and personal forces.
About the author: Born in Ukraine and raised in Canada, Reva previously published a short story collection and works as an opera librettist.
In December 1962, a severe snowstorm hits the West Country in England, interrupting the lives of two neighbouring couples. Eric Parry is a doctor with unresolved secrets, while Rita Simmons and her husband are trying to build a new life on a failing dairy farm. As the blizzards intensify, the characters are forced into a series of reckonings with their past and with one another.
About the author: Miller's first novel, Ingenious Pain, won several international prizes. He was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2001 and won the Costa Book of the Year in 2011.
Tom Layward, a law professor, drives his daughter to university with plans to finally leave his wife, an intention he has delayed for over a decade. After dropping off his daughter, he continues driving west, visiting people from his past and avoiding news of his own health and professional troubles. The novel follows a man navigating family ties, regret, and the prospect of change in late middle age.
About the author: Markovits grew up in Texas, London, and Berlin. He played professional basketball in Germany before becoming a novelist. His previous work won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and he was named one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists in 2013.
Two people meet in a restaurant. One is a woman in the midst of rehearsals for a new play. The other is a young man who may or may not be connected to her past. From this minimal setup, Kitamura constructs a dual narrative that constantly shifts perspective and implication. The book examines relationships defined by performance, misrecognition, and shifting roles.
About the author: Kitamura is an American novelist and critic whose previous novel Intimacies was longlisted for the National Book Award and selected among The New York Times' 10 Best Books of the Year. She teaches at New York University and has worked across fiction, criticism, and translation.
Louisa is ten years old when she and her father walk out onto a breakwater in a small Japanese coastal town. Hours later, she washes up on the beach alone, and her father is presumed drowned. From this moment, Flashlight traces the impact of that loss across decades and continents, as Louisa's life and family history unfold in layers. The novel moves between Korean and American settings, exploring both personal memory and broader historical forces.
About the author: Choi is the author of six novels. Her fifth, Trust Exercise, won the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction. She teaches at Johns Hopkins University and has written widely on literature and politics.
After the death of her father, Teresa returns to a small coastal town in Greece. She had previously visited the town after the loss of her mother and now finds herself encountering familiar places and people. The narrative is reflective and episodic, as she observes the town and reflects on a prior encounter with a man struggling with his own grief.
About the author: Buckley is a British novelist and critic. He has written for the Times Literary Supplement and previously won the BBC National Short Story Award. One Boat is his thirteenth novel and follows his award-winning Tell, which won the Novel Prize in 2022.
In 1980, a teenage girl named Dawn leaves Trinidad for Venezuela, where she gives birth and places the child for adoption. Four decades later, living in England and now divorced, Dawn receives a message from someone who may be her lost daughter. The novel follows Dawn as she reckons with her past, her present family, and the choices that have defined her life.
About the author: Adam was born in Trinidad and studied in the UK and the US. Her first novel, Golden Child, was published in 2019 and won the Desmond Elliott Prize. Love Forms is her second novel and marks her return to Trinidad as a setting.
Aishwarya Khosla is a journalist currently serving as Deputy Copy Editor at The Indian Express. Her writings examine the interplay of culture, identity, and politics.
She began her career at the Hindustan Times, where she covered books, theatre, culture, and the Punjabi diaspora. Her editorial expertise spans the Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Chandigarh, Punjab and Online desks.
She was the recipient of the The Nehru Fellowship in Politics and Elections, where she studied political campaigns, policy research, political strategy and communications for a year.
She pens The Indian Express newsletter, Meanwhile, Back Home.
Write to her at [e-mail] or [e-mail]. You can follow her on Instagram: @ink_and_ideology, and X: @KhoslaAishwarya. ... Read More