Navigating the 2025 Booker Prize shortlist

Narrowing down from a list of 153 books and eventually settling on a shortlist of six, the Booker Prize this year has been anything but predictable. With the shortlist strictly dominated by veteran authors, it is fair enough to say that this year's winner selection won't be easy. Roddy Doyle, the chair of judges, said in a statement that the shortlisted writers are "in total command of their own store of English, their own rhythm, their own expertise." Each author, except Kiran Desai, has more than five books under their belt.

The shortlist is an exemplary and robust showcase of six extraordinary works that are a testament to why these authors are masters of their craft. From family dramas, to haunting expressions of love and loss, to stories of blurred memory and loss of identity, this year's shortlist is the dynamic, assorted mix of novels.

Flashlight
Susan Choi
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (US), 2025
When asked about her novel, Susan Choi stated that it "kind of wrote itself like a snail shell. It just kept spiraling outward in both directions." Heavily inspired by her own upbringing in the midwest as a daughter of a Korean father and a Russian-Jewish mother, Choi dives deep into her own life as she writes this book. The book began as a short story published in The New Yorker.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
Kiran Desai
Hogarth, 2025
Kiran Desai is no new name in the Booker community. She has already proved herself after winning the Booker prize in 2006 with her novel The Inheritance of Loss. This time, nearly 20 years later, she writes about love and society, and gifts us "a social novel in a love story". 

Audition
Katie Kitamura
Riverhead Books, 2025
Set to turn into a live-action movie starring Lucy Liu and Charles Melton, Audition is a novel that questions whether we know the people we love, managing to ask the uncomfortable questions with ease. Kitamura got the idea for the novel from a headline that read "A stranger told me he was my son". She added that she was mesmerised by the idea that "in a single encounter, in a single moment, everything you understand about yourself and your place in the world could be overturned."

The Rest of Our Lives
Ben Markovits
Faber, 2025
Quietly exhilarating and moving, The rest of our lives is a novel about family, marriage, and how both of them are failing a middle-aged academic. Sweet and bitter at the same time, it's been called "a remarkably satisfying road trip full of strangers, friends, and self-discovery." by the Booker judges.

The Land in Winter
Andrew Miller
Sceptre, 2024
Miller's second novel to make the Booker's shortlist (after Oxygen in 2001), The Land in Winter narrates the story of two couples during the UK's big freeze of 1962-63. "Andrew Miller brings suspense and mystery to this seemingly inconsequential chapter in British history," said the judges about the novel. This is Miller's 10th book.

Flesh
David Szalay
Scribner, 2025
This is also Szalay's second novel to enter the shortlist (All That Man Is made the list in 2016). The novel is set in Hungary and follows a young man named István from his early years into adulthood. Almost a hypnotic novel in a lyrical sense, Szalay asks the fundamental questions: What drives a life? What makes it all worth living?—and arrives at a different point depending on the reader who reads it.

This year's Booker Prize will be announced on November 10 in a ceremony that will be broadcast live on BBC Radio 4 and livestreamed on Booker Prize's social channels. The winner will receive EUR 50,000 (USD 67,600) whereas the shortlisted writers will receive EUR 2,500 (USD 3,380) and a specially bound edition of their book.

Iftehaz Yeasir Iftee is a poet and student at IBA, University of Dhaka. He contributed to the global poetry anthology Luminance: Words for a World Gone Wrong under the pen name Brotibir Roy.