Who will win this year’s Booker Prize? Our reviewers share their thoughts

The shortlist for the 2025 Booker Prize was announced on Tuesday and, as ever, has proven controversial. Only one British writer is featured in this year’s list and no debut authors. Unsurprisingly, there are some familiar faces in the mix: Andrew Miller and David Szalay have both been nominated in the past, as well as Kiran Desai, who won the prize in 2006. The winner is announced on November 10, so there is still plenty of time to read through the shortlist and see if you can predict the winning author, who will receive £50,000. 

 The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai (Hamish Hamilton £25, 688pp)

The loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is available now from the Mail Bookshop

Spanning several decades, this follows a star-crossed pair. Sunny, a would-be journalist, escapes his native India and overbearing mother to carve out an immigrant’s existence in New York, then Mexico. 

However, Sonia, a would-be writer, is cursed by her liaison with a malevolent artist and remains in the country of her birth, facing all the challenges of a woman alone. 

Theirs is a painful, stop-start affair, but this is so much more than a love story, exploring themes of race, class, toxic entanglements and connection. Profound, moving and magnificent. 

Stephanie Cross

THE LAND IN WINTER by Andrew Miller (Sceptre £10, 384pp)

THE brutal winter of 1962 provides a backdrop for Miller’s latest book, which revolves around two couples. 

Dr Eric Parry has left London for a country practice, his wife Irene in tow. Now she is pregnant, as is her neighbour, troubled former nightclub hostess Rita Simmonds. 

It’s a novel of suggestive lyricism and haunting moods and motifs (not least among them the unquiet ghosts of the war and its terrible crimes), brought together in a devastating denouement.

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Flesh by David Szalay (Vintage £18.99, 368pp)

 As a young man in the army, Istvan witnesses something so appalling it takes him years to recover from it. 

Work as a chauffeur to a wealthy businessman, marriage, fatherhood and extraordinary wealth all follow, yet he remains a taciturn witness to his own life. 

This is a superb, surprisingly propulsive novel that allows us to know a character on an intimate level without that character barely saying a word, and which through its flat, airless, colourless prose captures something of the alienated despairing fatalism at the heart of modern life. 

Claire Allfree

The Rest of Our Lives by Benjamin Markovits  (Faber £9.99, 256pp)

When Tom Layward’s wife had an affair 12 years ago, the couple muddled through. Now, though, instead of heading home after he has dropped their youngest daughter at university in Pittsburgh, he’s driving the family Volvo across America on his own. 

This is a wry, soulful reimagining of the classic road-trip novel, in which a culture wars subplot and looming health crisis add tension and edge to Tom’s masterfully evoked midlife reckoning. 

Hephzibah Anderson

 FLASHLIGHT by Susan Choi (Jonathan Cape £20, 464pp)

At the centre of this epic novel are the Kangs: Serk, Anne and Louisa. Though born in Japan, Serk doesn’t discover he’s ethnically Korean until the end of the Second World War.

He subsequently emigrates to the US, where he marries Anne and fathers Louisa. On a work trip to Japan, he disappears, shattering their small family unit. Rage, not love, is default in this fractious family, which keeps the novel’s first half at a roiling boil. 

It makes for an expanse of narrative ground to cover, but Choi’s startling, bristling characters power this journey, which plays in the read. 

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AUDITION by Katie Kitamura (Fern Press £18.99, 208pp)

 The narrative unspools over the course of a lunch in Manhattan between two actors, an older woman and a young man named Xavier. 

The narrator is tormented by internal questions about identity. 

‘The unknowability of others is a central theme’ according to the LA Times, while The Guardian described it as a novel ‘of mirrored halves, angled towards an absent centre’, and while it may eschew ‘the basic precepts of the novelistic form’, the overall effect is a ‘literary performance of true uncanniness’. 

James Carey