On Monday, November 10, the winner of the Booker Prize for 2025 will be announced. On the shortlist are three men and three women. There’s Kiran Desai’s 800-page magnum opus The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, which was almost two decades in the making after her 2006 Booker Prize-winning novel, The Inheritance of Loss. There are books by Andrew Miller and David Szalay, the authors of The Land in Winter and Flesh, respectively, who have been shortlisted before. And Katie Kitamura (Audition), Ben Markovits (The Rest of Our Lives) and Susan Choi (Flashlight) have been nominated for the Prize the first time.
Obviously, there are no bad books here. Covering themes from loneliness and generational trauma to geopolitics, motherhood, and marriage, these are novels that travel the globe. Each author employs language differently. One adds poetry to detail; the other holds the strings so taut, they hum. Below, we weigh each book’s chances of winning this year’s Booker Prize. (This year’s International Booker Prize went to Banu Mushtaq and Deepa Bhasthi for Heart Lamp, so might this be India’s year?)
Audition by Katie Kitamura
📚 The plot: It’s complicated. The book is divided into two parts. In the first, a woman, an actor, is meeting a younger man in a restaurant. She might be his mother, the young man tells her. His gestures seem oddly familiar, till she realises he’s mirroring her own. In the second part, the young man is her son.
👍 What it has going for it: The master of taut prose, as demonstrated in novels like A Separation and Intimacies, returns with a story that seems part family drama, part thriller, part a reflection of personhood, and in part an examination of the scaffolding that holds a family together, all in under 200 pages.
👎 But wait a minute… The shifting-sands nature of the plot might prove disorienting for some.
Booker odds: 😵💫 Unlikely to win
Flashlight by Susan Choi
📚 The plot: Ten-year-old Louisa is visiting a Japanese beach town with her dad Serk and mom Anne. While on holiday, Louisa and her dad, a Korean emigrant now working at a university in America, go out on a walk. Next day, Louisa is found on the beach alone, and Serk is missing, presumed drowned. Serk’s disappearance marks a pivot in Louisa and Anne’s lives that has lifelong consequences. While there’s a mystery at the heart of the story, this is also a story of familial relationships, geopolitical strife, historical wrongs, memory, and grief.
👍 What it has going for it: An excerpt from Flashlight was first published in The New Yorker. Like The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, Flashlight, too, is an ambitious novel. While Choi’s previous novel Trust Exercise deftly spun a tale of power, trust, and blame set in a drama school in the 1980s, Flashlight’s scope, both geographically and thematically, is significantly wider, going from Indiana to Osaka to North Korea.
👎 But wait a minute... A mild sense of oppression pervades the novel. Louisa’s precocity rankles, and you keep hoping some kindness comes Anne’s way through her illness and loneliness. But every moment of lightness proves ephemeral. The big reveal, when it comes, doesn’t really lift the lid off the pressure cooker. The stress makes you want to step out and touch grass or something. It’s relentless—no matter how brilliant the handling of the subject matter.
Booker odds: 🤧 Least likely to win
The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller
📚 The plot: Set in the Big Freeze of 1962, Andrew Miller’s novel primarily revolves around two couples in rural West Country, England. Eric Parry is a young GP having an affair while his pregnant wife, Irene, is spending her days reading cookbooks and obsessing over the menu for the Christmas party they are throwing. On the other side of the field live Bill Simmons, a dreamer turned farmer and son of a well-to-do London landlord, and his pregnant wife, Rita, a former showgirl from Bristol who is struggling to calm the voices in her head. Amid temperamental Rayburn heaters, early-morning cow milkings for one man and sluggish day-long patient house visits for the other, as the land freezes and thaws, everyone’s looking for some kind of warmth.
👍 What it has going for it: As the title of the novel suggests, the weather is its own character here. In a bleak landscape, there’s mirth but there’s also violence. Andrew Miller is no stranger to being on the Booker Prize shortlist—he was earlier nominated for Oxygen—or putting ordinary people in extraordinary situations.
👎 But wait a minute… Nah.
Booker odds: This could win. A very strong contender 👌
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai
📚 The plot: Sunny Bhatia and Sonia Shah meet on a train and there’s an instant spark. Soon they realise they were also the subjects of a failed (albeit half-hearted) matchmaking attempt by their respective families. Sonia is in Allahabad after a troubled, toxic relationship with an art monster back in the States, and Sunny is navigating a relationship in Brooklyn while nurturing an ambition to see his byline in a print newspaper instead of sending out wire stories at AP. Add to this relatives fighting over cooks and property, an ageing aunt full of self-pity, lonely parents with a proclivity for sabotage, the immigrant experience, a narrative moving from Vermont to Allahabad to New York to Mexico to Goa, a precious amulet, and there’s a lot going on.
👍 What it has going for it: This is the first novel Kiran Desai has written after her previous Booker-winning novel, The Inheritance of Loss, so the book was buzzy even before its release. That’s unfair, though. There’s beauty and lightness in this 800-novel where you’re offered a window into each character’s inner lives, and not just those in the title. You couldn’t subtract 10 pages from it if you tried (you wouldn’t).
👎 But wait a minute… The book is almost 800 (!) pages long, which shouldn’t matter to those who read, but in an age of the micro novel—Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These is told in around 100 pages, while Samantha Harvey’s Booker Prize winner, Orbital, was 136 pages long—it feels daunting.
Booker odds: Most likely to win 🙌
The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits
📚 The plot: Lawyer Tom Layward, on a sabbatical from work, is dropping off his daughter, Miri, at college in Pittsburgh. However, instead of going home to his wife, Amy, in New York, Tom decides to keep driving west, meeting family and old friends. There’s an old promise he made to himself that propels him: Amy cheated on him 12 years ago, and Tom told himself he’d leave her after their youngest child left the nest.
👍 What it has going for it: As Miranda July’s All Fours proved, we love a midlife road-trip novel. As Tom muses on his “C-minus” marriage, the prickly relationship between his wife and daughter, old girlfriends, and dodgy friends, you gain insights into Tom that might be eluding him. There are contemplations on ageing, fatherhood, basketball, and beliefs that might place one on the wrong side of history.
👎 But wait a minute… The novel’s cleverness takes a while to become apparent. On the surface, it’s simpler than its fellow nominees but also deeply satisfying.
Booker odds: Somewhat likely to win but won’t 🤔
Flesh by David Szalay
📚 The plot: Fifteen-year-old Istvan lives in a Hungary with his mother. Awkward and taciturn, he somehow gets into a relationship with a much older woman. The relationship ends in violence, and he goes from a young offenders’ institution to the army to the British upper class and, somehow, back where his story began. The novel has been causing a sensation in literary circles way before the Booker Prize longlisting. Plus, Szalay has been on the Booker Prize shortlist before.
👍 What it has going for it: The prose is sparse and minimal. It somehow reminds you of his fellow nominee Katie Kitamura. Great highs and terrible lows are narrated with a matter-of-factness that’s almost hilarious but cuts right to the essence of things. Big questions are answered with an unblinking “OK”. The language mirrors the protagonist’s detachment and is wielded deftly.
👎 But wait a minute... The novel lies somewhere between Katie Kitamura’s starkness with language and Kiran Desai’s ambition with plot, which could be advantageous or not.
Booker odds: Maybe it wins, maybe not 🤷♀️
