Update November 10, 2025: David Szalay’s Flesh is the Booker Prize winner.
Update November 9, 2025: Tomorrow the 2025 Booker Prize winner will be announced. I’ve never managed to finish the entire longlist prior to a winner being announced, largely because a small handful of the novels aren’t yet available directly in the U.S. This year, I worked around this and devoted myself to finishing.
My pick for the winner among the shortlist is Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter, but my favorite from the entire longlist was Benjamin Wood’s Seascraper, and I’m surprised it didn’t make the shortlist.
Both Susan Choi’s Flashlight and Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny are also worthy, and my prediction is that Sonia and Sunny will win.
The Booker Prize is the pinnacle of literary accomplishment. I say this as if I’ve put any effort into comparing The Booker Prize to the numerous other literary awards, which is a decent calibration for how you should cling to my literary judgement.
In my defense, in the past several years I’ve read most of the nominated books, stymied occasionally by other demands, a few I disliked so much I couldn’t finish, or release dates and availability that simply prevented access.
This consumption volume should put me in nearly expert territory.
In the months preceding the announcement of The Booker Prize longlist on July 26, I spend time trying to predict and read the potential nominees, otherwise I’ve got to try to squeeze reading 13 books into my busiest three months of work. The winner is announced on November 10 this year.
My pursuit is always disappointing; I’ll have read a single book that lands on the longlist. Add this to your calibration. But the exercise does yield exciting discoveries, and none more than this year. So much so that I begin my annual devotion and series of mini reviews through a lens filmed by near despair and snooty skepticism. And a decision to drop in thoughts about the more egregious derelictions.
We begin with Flesh, and I’ll update blog post as I go.
Flesh, by David Szalay
[Note: Flesh has been shortlisted.]
David Szalay came to my attention earlier this year with the publication of Flesh, so first I retreated and read All That Man Is, his first Booker nomination. That book’s title is a perfect four-word summary of Flesh.
When Flesh made this year’s Booker longlist, I gave it a second read so that I could explore why the life of its main character, István, and the novel itself left me so numb. Its central question: What did István’s life amount to? Oh, István had a life! Told with other intentions, his story is a series of adventures, some tragic, some ascendant, spanning humble beginnings into early adulthood in Hungary, and later the accumulation of immense wealth during the bulk of his life in London. But in Szalay’s hands, István’s experiences are inoculated from joy. They’re fallen into, without willfulness, and even experienced by István himself with nonchalance, as if simply the next task set someone sets before him. All of it observed through spartan prose, which serves to heighten that central existential question. It’s a brilliant accomplishment, but is that all that Flesh is?
Universality, by Natasha Brown
Natasha Brown’s Universality begins with a bang—a gripping investigative news article that details the events of a rave held by squatters encamped at the abandoned estate of a wealthy businessman, during which one of the squatters bludgeons the group’s leader with a 20-pound gold bar.
And now I wish the novel ended there, as a short story, because the rest of it is a tired philosophy debate about wokeness and capitalism, disguised as dialog between a series of characters I never get a chance to care about or despise. Sure, most literary fiction has a point to make, but the best works assume a reader intelligent enough not to need a verbal bludgeoning.
One Boat, by Jonathan Buckley
Jonathan Buckley’s One Boat is about Teresa, a divorced British lawyer, who visits a small Greek town on the sea after the death of her mother, and nine years later after the death of her father. In what’s meant to be an attempt to process those deaths, we are never quite connected to the grief. These trips are more about self discovery and, in part, processing her ex-husband’s betrayal.
Buckley interweaves these two timelines so you can barely see the seams. I sometimes forgot which visit I was reading, and I mean that in a good way. Sometimes Buckley purposely exposes the seams, using excerpts of journal entries Teresa made on her first visit, overlaid onto the present. Beyond the tapestry, there are delightful rekindlings of the friendships Teresa made nine years earlier, and her self discovery is wonderfully exposed through the friendships’ evolutions. During Teresa’s first visit, she meets John, an older man who has decided to avenge the death of his nephew—which we’re left to deduce has some connection to Petros, an erstwhile auto repairman Teresa also befriends. Although many of these dalliances are without depth, they do serve One Boat’s propulsion.
It was Teresa I didn’t care for. Maybe that’s on purpose. Her introspection turns into repetitive, mystifying, and relentless philosophical circles, often presented out loud to the demur Petros, who seems to endure Teresa rather than seek her company. If I could meet him in real life, I’d shake his hand and commend him. At least I only had to read the words on a page.
As I reached the end of One Boat, beaten down by a final barrage of Teresa’s self discovery spin-outs, I finally found closure in its final chapter, and I’m really giving nothing of value away here: Teresa has decided to make a novel of her Greek visits. She is sitting with Patrick—relationship to Teresa unknown—to hear his thoughts and suggestions upon reading a draft, and they render the perfect critique of One Boat.
Love Forms, by Claire Adam
Love Forms begins with our narrator, 58-year-old Dawn Bishop, as a 16-year old in her native Trinidad. Her father is a successful businessman. Dawn gets pregnant. Her family, afraid of the embarrassment, forces her to hide away in Venezuela with nuns until the baby arrives and is whisked away. Dawn returns to her normal life back home.
In between that experience and Dawn at 58, she moves to London, becomes a doctor, marries, has two sons, and divorces. But she’s never recovered from giving up her baby, and spends most of her adulthood searching for clues that would help reunite them.
These clues draw on a flawed memory of her experience in Venezuela, clouded by time and regret and shame, unzipped and laid open by Adam, such that Love Forms reads at times like a personal diary, like Dawn is telling her story only to you.
I didn’t want it to end, and I won’t spoil it, but Love Form’s last chapter is triumphant in unexpected ways—perfectly delivered.
Misinterpretation, by Ledia Xhoga
Misinterpretation caught me off guard. Quick, funny, ironic. Written like a caper. Or maybe a series of capers.
Our protagonist is an Albanian interpreter living in New York, whose empathy for her clients compels her to be so deeply intertwined in their lives that it causes fissures in hers, including with her husband, Billy.
This fragility stems from her own inability to interpret–not words, which come easy to her, but the unspoken language of relationships. She can read a page, but not a room.
More than anything, this is a fun novel with some memorable writing—full to the brim with lines like this: “We’ll make it work, I thought, even though being around Billy still reminded me of a car I once owned whose check engine light stayed on.”
(Not a Booker Longlist Nominee) Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst
Note: I wanted to give the Booker longlist a chance to prove my hunches wrong about which books would make it. I’m now convinced Our Evenings was a big miss.
I’ve been meaning to read Alan Hollinghurst ages, and after reading Our Evenings, I regret that I’ve waited this long. This is just one of those books where you savor every page, every sentence as you grow up with David Win as he discovers his sexuality, and his identity as a budding scholar, and later an actor.
Being half Burmese, he experiences racism, bullying, and lives in the shadowed secrets of his parents’ past. And yet his life is also charmed—he has a benefactor, excels in school and on the stage . . . and the richness of Hollinghurst’s pen to make what is essentially just an ordinary life seem extraordinary.
I can count on one hand the books I re-read in the course of my life. Our Evenings starts the other hand.
Flashlight, by Susan Choi
[Note: Flashlight has been shortlisted.]
Once in a long while, an epic novel like Flashlight comes along. David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns Of Jacob De Zoet comes to mind, as does Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger. Something that travels across time or geography or human nature or all of the above. An investment of a reader’s time, as arduous as it is beautiful, and with big payoffs. Something that will live with you forever. Books like Flashlight are why I read fiction.
It is the story of Serk, a Japanese-born Korean patriarch, Anne, the American mother, and their daughter Louisa. They are living in Japan, where Serk is assigned to teach. He and 10-year-old Louisa take a walk on the beach and later Louisa is discovered, washed ashore, and Serk has disappeared. What follows is what life looks like in the traumatic aftermath—and to say much more would give too much of it away. It will stab you in the chest and it will infuse you with hope, and you’ll be glad you read it.
The South, by Tash Aw
Tash Aw’s The South is the first installment of a quartet. It takes place in Malaysia during a Summer that is rocked by heat and drought. A family travels to an inherited farm that is in the middle of the drought’s destruction. They reunite with the farmhand and his son, Chuan, and their lives intertwine.
The narrator is the family’s youngest son, Jay . . . sometimes. Other times, the story is told in the third person, observer style, and still others from Jay’s perspective as an adult. It’s not as confusing as it sounds. Aw works between perspectives nimbly.
This is a love story between Jay and the farmhand’s son, and it gains velocity and bursts to life in this stark and spartan landscape, amid a deteriorating marriage between Jay’s parents, amid Jay’s sisters’ apathy toward . . . well just about anything. Jay finds his stride among the farm workers, working the land, and exploring love for the first time.
It’s pleasant enough to read, and I’ll probably continue in the series when the next book emerges, but I wouldn’t urge you to rush to do the same.
Audition, by Katie Kitamura
[Note: Audition has been shortlisted.]
Katie Kitamura’s superb novel, Audition, is told in two parts. In the first, our narrator, an accomplished older actress meets Xavier, a young man who claims to be the narrator’s abandoned son—a possibility she refutes. The meeting unsettles her, so much so that Xavier’s persistence in getting together again begins to strain her marriage and her ability to find a way to encompass the character she is rehearsing for a new play. All of this unfolds with breathtaking velocity, enhanced by lengthy sentences with oxygen-sip commas.
Part two brings together the same trio — narrator, husband (Tomas), and Xavier — picking up the story from the play’s live performances, but this time Xavier is actually the narrator and Tomas’s son, and a theater assistant working to become a playwright.
These choices Kitamura makes—the dizzying pace, the juxtaposed context of the two narratives—are intentional to Audition’s clever purpose of calling into question the parts we play in life and the distance between our truths and the ones we choose to reveal. And perhaps whether in creating such a separation, we risk losing sight of what’s real. Or losing sight of the shore, as our actress narrator calls it in one of Audition’s most profound passages about an actor’s mesmerizing performance in a film called Salvation.
I enjoyed every thrilling moment of Audition.
The Land in Winter, by Andrew Miller
[Note: The Land in Winter has been shortlisted.]
I’ve been looking forward to reading Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter for a while. Like several Booker Prize nominees, it wasn’t available through American retail bookshops or on Amazon’s Kindle. Eventually, I ordered it from London.
I was lucky enough as a high school sophomore to be tossed into a class of juniors and seniors for English class, which really turned out to be a literature class. Solely Dickens and Hardy. We learned to deconstruct entire novels, once veering midway through Hardy’s Far From a Madding Crowd into the depths of Thomas Grey’s poem Elegy in a Country Churchyard, a mere line from which the novel’s title and themes were borrowed.
I could imagine weeks spent, now, deconstructing Miler’s more modern novel—though it is set outside Bristol, England at the end of 1962 and the beginning of 1963, still faintly post World War II. It wouldn’t surprise you to learn it takes place in Winter.
Its primary characters are two couples who live next to each other: A town doctor, a nascent farmer, their wives, both pregnant. On the surface, normalcy. But there is no story in that. A suicide at an asylum, a secret affair, and the inescapability of untidy pasts and social class are magnified in a series of winter storms that seize and darken the town.
There is not a wasted word in Miller’s elegiac prose. I stared at sentences, I stopped and imagined how he arrived at just the right word, the right way to bring a moment home:
“The bull was easier to handle at this hour. The half-light veiled their gazes and made them, perhaps, less threatening to each other. He studied it a full minute, then let himself into the pen and clipped the lead to the brass nose ring. The bull’s breath on the back of his hand, the heat of its idling heart. He touched its haunch with the top of the bat. It moved, stiff-legged. He led it towards the dispersal yard. Then they fell out of step he felt the sudden tug, as though he were holding a planet on a kite string.”
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, by Kiran Desai
[Note: The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny has been shortlisted.]
Kiran Desai’s last novel, The Inheritance of Loss, won the Booker Prize in 2006, almost 20 years ago. Desai has packed an entire lifetime into The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny.
At one point late in the novel, Sonia tells her mother she is working on a return to writing fiction: “You have to live enough life for a story to unfold.” Her mother asks: “Do you think you have one?” In a nod to the life she’s lived, Sonia replies: “I catch a glimpse in the forest. I felt it beneath me in the ocean when I swam.”
Later, Desai’s narrator writes in observation regarding Sonia: “What if she stepped back to survey what she had wrought and saw that it lay in incoherent pieces? If she waited long enough, observed long enough, worked deeply, would everything confine—if she respected and preserved the shadows?”
Is this what Desai has done in the intervening years since The Inheritance of Loss?
Desai takes us from northeast India to country’s southwest in Goa, from Vermont to New York City, and deep into the heart of Mexico. This isn’t a masterpiece that I’ll dust off and re-read years from now; its tapestry will live inside me forever.
It is at times magical realism, a fable, a love story. Like The Inheritance of Loss, it is about identity, not just on a personal level, but for a diaspora. Mostly, as its titles suggests, it is about inescapable loneliness, but also about what that loneliness erects, both bad and good—fear and jealousy; love, art, even existence.
In a Booker interview about Sonia and Sunny, Desai said Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in a Time of Cholera and Chronicle of a Death Foretold were inspirations. Separately, Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh changed the way she thought about the world. Marquez and Rushdie repeatedly came to mind while reading Sonia and Sunny. But Desai’s clutch on every little detail is such a hallmark of her writing, it stands alone—no character, no landscape or geographic fact, no plant name, no bird, no piece of history seems to escape her eye and her pen. Is this what 20 years has wrought?
This is not an easy novel. Its heft and detail, its mysticism, its abundance of symbolism (mirrors, shadows, clouds, ghosts, eyes, birds, water), and its philosophical introspection make The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny something to reflect on more than power through. And at times, it wore me down. Yet the rewards for my stamina were also immense and plentiful—the last parts of the novel left me stirred as it narrowed its immense gaze toward a single point: a magical love story.
The Rest of Our Lives, by Ben Markovits
[Note: The Rest of Our Lives has been shortlisted.]
Around 25 years ago, I wanted to write a book about playground basketball courts in America from the standpoint of just a normal middle-aged dad. But a normal middle-aged dad doesn’t really have the time to do such things.
Unless you’re Tom Layward, the main character in Ben Markovits’ The Rest of Our Lives. This is a small subplot, one of many that seemed to speak directly to me. Beyond these coincidences, The Rest of Our Lives is honest and funny. Its understated prose, in first-person confessional style, gives us everything we need to know to understand Tom Layward—the prose style by itself it makes The Rest of Our Lives worth reading.
Tom, 55, has delayed a mid-life crisis. Delayed, because about the time most men experience it, his wife, Amy, cheated on him, but his daughter Miriam was 12 years away from going off to college. He decided then that once she was out of the house, he would leave Amy.
Twelve years is a long time, but that’s where the story begins, starting with a trip to drop Miriam off at school, and continuing toward a series self-reflective encounters. I was entertained by the wit. Explaining the status of his marriage to his friend Sam, Tom says: “For the past . . . I don’t know, two or three years, she’s been seeing a therapist, which means when you argue with Amy, it’s like there’s this other person in the room, who’s a certified expert, and you have to argue with her, too.” That’s just one passage I chose at random. This is how the entire novel reads.
In speaking about Amy, Tom says: “Even at her age, she has to deal with male attention and doesn’t want it but can’t help trying to be nice about it. I don’t know why I thought that. Maybe because seeing her again after a week you see her the way she actually looks, like, if you ran into her in the airport lounge you’d think, I hope I sit next to her. I’m not making much sense.”
But Markowitz makes Tom make all kinds of sense. It’s unadorned and yet nearly perfect because of it.
Seascraper, by Benjamin Wood
Can I interest you in a novel about catching shrimp only in shallow waters when the tide is low? What if that means traipsing by horse and cart in the wee hours of morning? Sounds irresistible, I know.
But Benjamin Wood’s Seascraper, a novella about a shrimper, Thomas Flett, living in northwest England along the Irish Sea in 1962 is a flat-out revelation.
Seascraper is brutal, lonely work—conducted in fog, mist, rain, and the dreary, cold grey of the coast. It’s made bleaker still because it yields a meager living for Thomas and his widowed mother. This will be Thomas’ life, handed down from his grandfather, and he is resigned to it.
Yet against this gloomy backdrop, slivers of light fight their way through as Thomas discovers he may have musical talent, as he pines for his best friend’s sister, as he allows himself to dream of a better life.
It is this juxtaposition of starkness and hope that makes Seascraper so compelling. It doesn’t hurt that Wood’s writing is saturated with a poetic and irresistible prose, as he transports you to the sea, making you feel every mist and every gritty morsel of sand.
Endling, by Maria Reva
If a novel about shrimping doesn’t dazzle you, how about saving endangered snails in Ukraine (an endling is the last of a snail species)?
In Maria Reva’s Endling, our rescuing heroine is Yeva, who travels Ukraine in a converted camper-cum-biology lab. She makes money by volunteering on romance tours, where bachelors are enticed to find love on getaway trips. Yeva is pulled further into these romance tours by two sisters, Nastia and Sol, who are plotting to expose these tours in homage to their mother, a female activist in hiding.
Endling is an inventive novel, set against the backdrop of the Russia-Ukraine war, full of plot twists and hilarious adventures. Although it is an admirable literary accomplishment, I found it overabundant with gauzy themes and, at times, a bit self-indulgent.