From a vast range of global experiences to books brimming with long-held secrets, from fresh voices to Booker Prize alumni, here’s the lowdown on this year’s longlist.
The Booker Prize 2025 longlist has now been announced – a selection of 13 superb works of long-form fiction, chosen from over 150 titles written in English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between 1 October 2024 and 30 September 2025.
As Roddy Doyle, Chair of judges, says: ‘There are short novels and some very long ones. There are novels that experiment with form and others that do so less obviously. Some of them examine the past and others poke at our shaky present. They are all alive with great characters and narrative surprises. All, somehow, examine identity, individual or national, and all, I think, are gripping and excellent.’
The 13 nominated books are:
- Love Forms by Claire Adam (Faber)
- The South by Tash Aw (4th Estate)
- Universality by Natasha Brown (Faber)
- One Boat by Jonathan Buckley (Fitzcarraldo Editions)
- Flashlight by Susan Choi (Jonathan Cape)
- The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai (Hamish Hamilton)
- Audition by Katie Kitamura (Fern Press)
- The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits (Faber)
- The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller (Sceptre)
- Endling by Maria Reva (Virago/Little, Brown)
- Flesh by David Szalay (Jonathan Cape)
- Seascraper by Benjamin Wood (Viking)
- Misinterpretation by Ledia Xhoga (Daunt Books Originals)
The longlist features authors representing four continents and nine countries: Albania, Canada, Hungary, India, Malaysia, Trinidad and Tobago, Ukraine, the UK and USA.
It features two debut novels – Ledia Xhoga’s Misinterpretation and Maria Reva’s Endling. Six debut novels have won the Booker in its 56-year history, the most recent being Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain.
The longest book on the list is Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, weighing in at over 650 pages, while the shortest is Universality by Natasha Brown – a small but mighty 156 pages, and one of four books on this year’s list that are under 200 pages long.
