The 2025 Booker Prize shortlist brings together six writers who have been chiseling away at their art for years, including Kiran Desai, leaving little room for the thrill of discovery we saw in years past
The shortlist for the 2025 Booker Prize, which was announced at a public ceremony — a first in the history of the prize — in London recently, reads like a conscious shrug at novelty. It includes six novels, all by writers the literary world already knows in some register: a former winner, two returning finalists, and three first-time Booker shortlistees.
The books are: Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny; Susan Choi’s Flashlight; Katie Kitamura’s Audition; Ben Markovits’s The Rest of Our Lives; Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter; and David Szalay’s Flesh. The list has set off a chatter in the literary circles that the shortlist has left no room for the thrill of discovery.
The entry of Desai (54) is the obvious headline, especially in India. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (Penguin Random House India), her first novel in nearly 20 years — since her Booker Prize-winning second novel, The Inheritance of Loss (2006) — is a melancholic epic about two Indian writers whose lives stretch from the American northeast back to India.
It’s a novel that is more interested in how identities are read into us than in tidy plot mechanics. Sweeping, lyrical and sometimes deliberately archaic in ambition, it’s both a love story and a meditation on migration, class and the aftershocks of empire. Desai’s novel can be seen as an argument for the slow novel; that the Booker still pays attention to that mode is reassuring.
Booker and writing by the diaspora
While it has cheered readers in India, Desai’s presence on the shortlist has also reopened a conversation about the Booker’s relationship to diaspora writing: does it privilege the same, familiar modes of cosmopolitan storytelling even as it touts global representation? Many have resented the way Anglophone literary infrastructure has found their way to the shortlist, once again: three Americans, two British (in the broad sense) and one India-born writer who has lived in the US for a long, long time.
Choi (The Foreign Student, American Woman, and Trust Exercise), and Kitamura (Intimacies, A Separation, The Longshot, Gone to the Forest) — are both based in New York, and both strong, consummate novelists who have been chiselling away at their art and craft for years. Choi (56) has long been recognised for her formal daring and psychological acuity.
Choi, in her past novels, has looked at identity, power and performance. Flashlight (464 pages) continues that practice; it’s a tightly calibrated novel that uses light as both metaphor and engine for revelation. Choi writes sentences that remain in your head; she’s generative about how small acts of attention produce, and undo, a life.
Kitamura, 46 (she is married to British novelist Hari Kunzru), is a minimalist by temperament: she has carved out a space for herself with spare, meticulous prose centred on power dynamics. Her novels are replete with spare sentences and narratives that unsettle by way of omission. Audition (208 pages) draws on midlife anxieties and the strange violence of ordinary domestic life, executed in her usual sparseness.
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According to some observers, the fact that Kitamura lives, writes and teaches in New York’s fertile literary orbit matters in that she represents a kind of transatlantic sensibility — formally restrained, psychologically probing — that the Booker often rewards for its “seriousness.”
British-American Ben Markovits (52) is the author of 12 novels, among them a trilogy on the life of Lord Byron. His 2016 novel, You Don’t Have To Live Like This, won the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction. Markovits, who has an eye for the domestic wreckage of history and the small mercies of character, makes The Rest of Our Lives (256 pages), a road trip novel, an exploration of middle age, memory and the slow politics of marriage.
Fiction and the human experience
Similarly, Miller (65), the well-known British author, has published 10 novels since his debut, Ingenious Pain, in 1997. His latest, The Land in Winter (384 pages), follows two young married couples as they cope with the pressures of isolation imposed by the extreme conditions of the 1962-63 Big Freeze, the coldest winter in the history of the UK.
Miller’s novel spans December to February, exploring the interplay between environment and human behaviour. The shortlist is an acknowledgement of his attention to the slow accumulation of details he pulls up to create a palpable, lived-in world. Miller lives in Somerset and has spent a career in landscapes, both internal and rural, with a humane, sometimes melancholy curiosity. The novel revisits his skill for atmospheric pressure: the way weather, ruin and the winter mind can reflect larger moral economies.
Hungarian-British novelist David Szalay (51), previously shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2016 for All That Man Is (378 pages), has written five works of fiction before. Flesh traces a Hungarian man’s life from adolescence to old age across multiple European countries. Szalay, whose work often arranges linked lives into a larger moral ledger, remains preoccupied with mobility, masculinity and the economics of bodies. Szalay now lives predominantly in Vienna, a fact that betrays his peripatetic eye; he writes like someone attuned to the friction between place and self.
The six shortlisted novels show us the different ways contemporary fiction can probe human experience. If you’re a fan of Booker's historical project — to elevate “the best” in English-language long-form fiction — you’ll find this shortlist comforting. If you wanted the prize to be a platform that frequently champions lesser-known writers, many of them published by the independent press in the UK, the list may feel conservative.
However, there’s a structural argument to be made against reading the shortlist as evidence of narrowness: seasoned writers can still surprise us, and the Booker Prize Foundation has often dealt with this dilemma rather well by striking a fine balance. This year’s panel, chaired by Roddy Doyle, which also included actor/publisher Sarah Jessica Parker, has consciously looked for intimacy and “human” storytelling, according to the judges’ statements.
That emphasis on the humane (read: character and moral interiority) is visible in the shortlist’s preoccupation with personal histories, relationships and the labour of living from one country to another. The prize’s small, sometimes baffling rituals (the longlist, the shortlist, the debate about eligibility) still produce readable maps of what literary institutions value right now.
A matter of the jury’s taste
There’s an irony in praising a shortlist for its sobriety: a book like The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, which runs into nearly 688 pages, is emphatically not safe for its sweep, its formal appetite and its moral reach are the opposite of the cautious, market-minded book. Desai’s return, then, complicates the ‘conservative’ charge: the prize can reward scale and risk, but mostly when it comes from a well-established writer.
The question that the critics of the prize will chew on as the Booker season progresses — is whether the Prize’s gatekeeping now looks at the body of work of a particular author or just the current work in the fray. Three novels that I particularly remember from years past that could be used as a counterpoint to this are: Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport (1000-plus pages), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2019, Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries (around 800 pages), which won in 2013, and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, on the shortlist in 2015.
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For an award that prizes English-language fiction globally, the shortlist is a map of where prestige publishing and literary networks still cluster: New York and London, with a European periphery in play. That’s not necessarily damning; literary life has always had hubs. But it is useful to call out: the Booker shortlist is frequently filtered through transatlantic infrastructures that favour certain publishing circuits, translators, and reviewers.
Let’s talk about risk. There’s institutional conservatism in nominating established names: it protects the prize from gaffes, it gives the judges cultural cover, and it guarantees a certain level of critical engagement. But the cost is the younger voices, formally daring newcomers, and books that challenge market expectations. The Booker, in this sense, has become both an arbiter of excellence and a mirror for the publishing industry’s ideas about what works and what doesn’t or what a particular jury panel makes of any novel; the latter always remains subjective. If you’re trying to spot where editorial taste is heading, the shortlist is a stronger signal than any launch or bestseller list: it tells you what literati will keep talking about for the coming months.
Risk, reward, and the prize’s identity
None of which is to undervalue the novels themselves. The best shortlists are energetic conversations rather than panels of judges adjudicating a single aesthetic. This list includes a migratory epic (Desai’s novel), a formalist (Kitamura), a moral anatomist (Choi), a chronicler of domestic continuity (Markovits), a landscape novelist (Miller), and a cosmopolitan moralist (Szalay). Put together, these approaches make for a wonderful mix that will delight any reader.
For readers and critics in India, Desai’s shortlisting will feel like a homecoming, and perhaps also a test. She’s a writer whose lineage (her mother, Anita Desai, has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times for her novels Clear Light of Day, In Custody, and Fasting, Feasting) and personal history are freighted with the stakes of postcolonial literature. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny asks how stories cross borders and what literary belonging looks like when language, accent and taste are constantly in motion.
We’ll know more when the winner is announced on November 10. Until then, expect a season of reappraisals: who reads what, which book gets the critical engine turned up, and whether the Booker’s eventual choice will be read as conservative reassurance or a sly nod toward a new kind of seriousness. The shortlist is a map of literary taste as much as it is a call to read, and right now it’s telling us to read slowly and closely.
