by Damla
The shortlist for the 2025 Booker Prizes has been announced this week, highlighting six books among an impressive collection.
This year’s selection revolves around themes of family: what can bring them together, and what can break them apart. Among the many critically acclaimed nominees is a previous Booker Prize winner (Kiran Desai in 2006 with The Inheritance of Loss), as well as some authors who were previously shortlisted for the Booker prize in earlier years (Andrew Miller’s Oxygen in 2001 and David Szalay’s All That Man Is in 2016).
Flesh by David Szalay
Teenaged Istvan lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. Shy and new in town, he soon becomes isolated, with his neighbor—a married woman close to his mother’s age. But as these periodical encounters shift into a clandestine relationship, his life soon spirals out of control, ending in a violent accident that leaves a man dead.
Spare and penetrating, Flesh traces the imperceptible but indelible contours of unresolved trauma and its aftermath amid the precarity and violence of an ever-globalizing Europe with incisive insight, unyielding pathos, and startling humanity.
The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller
December 1962, the West Country. Local doctor Eric Parry, mulling secrets, sets out on his rounds, while his pregnant wife sleeps on in the warmth of their cottage. Across the field, funny, troubled Rita Simmons is also asleep, her head full of images of a past life her husband prefers to ignore. There is affection – if not always love – in both homes. But when the ordinary cold of an English December gives way to violent blizzards, the two couples find their lives beginning to unravel. Where do you hide when you can’t leave home? And where, in a frozen world, can you run to?
The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits
What’s left when your kids grow up and leave home?
When Tom Layward’s wife had an affair he resolved to leave her as soon as his youngest daughter turned eighteen. Twelve years later, while taking her to Pittsburgh to start university, he remembers his pact, and keeps driving West.
An unforgettable road trip novel, The Rest of Our Lives beautifully explores the nuance and complications of a long term marriage.
Audition by Katie Kitamura
An exhilarating, destabilizing Möbius strip of a novel that asks whether we ever really know the people we love.
Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day – partner, parent, creator, muse – and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is the panoramic tale of two young people navigating the many forces that shape their lives: country, class, race, history, and the complicated bonds that link one generation to the next. A love story, a family saga, and a rich novel of ideas, it is the most ambitious and accomplished work yet by one of our greatest novelists.
Flashlight by Susan Choi
One night, Louisa and her father take a walk on the beach. He’s carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later Louisa is found washed up by the tide, barely alive. Her father is gone, presumed drowned. She is ten years old.
In chapters that shift from one member to the next, turning back again and again to that night by the sea, Susan Choi’s Flashlight chases the shockwaves of one family’s catastrophe. Louisa is an only child of parents who have severed themselves from the past.
