2025 Booker Prize shortlistFlashlight by Susan ChoiThe Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran DesaiAudition by Katie KitamuraThe Rest of Our Lives by Ben MarkovitsThe Land in Winter by Andrew MillerFlesh by David Szalay<\/p>\n
This year’s shortlist is dominated by American writers (Susan Choi, Katie Kitamura and Ben Markovits), who appear alongside two Brits (Andrew Miller and David Szalay) and an Indian author (Kiran Desai).<\/p>\n
Together with the reading public, the authors of the six books to make this year’s shortlist will find out who will take home the \u00a350,000 ($100,000) prize in a ceremony in London on November 10.<\/p>\n
To take a closer look at the list \u2014 and to speculate on who will win in 2025 \u2014 we’ve brought together The Book Show’s Claire Nichols and Sarah L’Estrange, The Bookshelf’s Kate Evans and writer and critic Declan Fry.<\/p>\n
Books about outsiders<\/p>\n
Claire Nichols: I think it’s a great list. The books are super readable. They’re all very different. No matter who’s on the panel, the Booker judges always seem to find fabulous reads.<\/p>\n
Sarah L’Estrange: For me, the books all explore our existential estrangement from each other and even from ourselves, as in Audition. They’re all trying to work out ways to bridge that gap, which is what good literary fiction does.<\/p>\n
They’re all about outsiders as well. We’ve got Sonia and Sunny; they’re outsiders in America and very lonely. In Flesh, we’ve got Istv\u00e1n; he’s an outsider in his hometown in Hungary, then in England, and even to himself, because we never really get into his head.<\/p>\n
Listen to the podcast<\/a><\/p>\n Your favourite fiction authors share the stories behind their latest books on ABC Radio National’s The Book Show.<\/p>\n Flashlight has fabulously difficult characters who are bumping up against each other, outsiders from the Korean American union, and in The Land in Winter, we’ve got these two couples who are opaque to each other as well.\u00a0<\/p>\n That’s my take on it \u2014 I don’t know if anyone else agrees.<\/p>\n Kate Evans: I love the fact, Sarah, that you’ve seen those connections because as I was thinking about them \u2014 and I agree, Claire, it’s a terrific selection \u2014 all I could think about was their differences in style. I couldn’t see those connections until you drew them out, so I really appreciate that.<\/p>\n CN: This is a year where we’re more aware of the judging panel than before because of Sarah Jessica Parker’s presence. Sarah [L’Estrange] and I have been chatting about whether the fact that there’s three American books on the list reflects her influence.<\/p>\n There’s fantastic realistic dialogue in some of these books, particularly Flesh and The Rest of Our Lives, and we also wondered if that was the Roddy Doyle factor, Roddy Doyle being the man who loves a good chat in fiction. There are some very chatty books.<\/p>\n It’s fun to read through the list and consider what judges have been behind what books.<\/p>\n What missed out<\/p>\n Declan Fry: One thought I had was that it’s sad that there are no Australians.<\/p>\n SL: From the longlist, I really loved Endling by Maria Reva. I found it flawed but compelling, and I’m still thinking about it. Any book that can make a dramatic story about snails is impressive. I really liked Seascraper by Benjamin Wood as well, and I was surprised that both weren’t on the shortlist. Who would I bump off the shortlist? I don’t know.<\/p>\n Listen to ABC RN’s The Bookshelf<\/a><\/p>\n The latest and best fiction reviewed by a team of dedicated bibliophiles.<\/p>\n DF: I had a different experience with Seascraper. As I was reading, I was thinking this book is atrociously bad. With apologies to Sarah, when it wasn’t on the shortlist, I thought, well, the judges picked that one right.<\/p>\n KE: I was intrigued by the idea of The South [by Tash Aw], and I would have liked to have seen it on the shortlist because it’s a novel that takes us into our region.<\/p>\n A geopolitical thriller Susan Choi won the National Book Award for her fifth novel, Trust Exercise. Flashlight is her sixth. (Supplied: Penguin Books Australia)<\/p>\n CN: Flashlight opens in a psychologist’s office. Louisa, a 10-year-old girl, has been acting out because her mum is sick and her dad is missing. Through the course of the book, we find out what happened to her dad. But what we know at the start is that the two of them were out walking on a beach in Japan, they went out with a flashlight to look at the stars, and something happened and the next minute he was gone, presumed dead, and she woke up on the beach all alone.<\/p>\n Louisa’s dad, Serk, is ethnically Korean but was born and raised in Japan while Louisa’s mum, Anne, is American. Louisa is the child of this cross-cultural relationship, and the book moves across Japan, Korea and America, and explores the history of Korea post-World War II.<\/p>\n KE: That opening is so good. Choi wrote a short story version for The New Yorker before she wrote the novel, and it’s just so exquisitely done. You’ve got this child who’s dealing with this devastating loss; her father has disappeared, and she’s spiky and wilful and clever and so vivid.<\/p>\n CN: All the characters in the book are so spiky, right?<\/p>\n When you watch the relationship between Louisa’s parents, you wonder why they ever fell in love with each other. They seem so ill-suited, and Louisa is the result of this miserable union. They’re all such sad characters in a way.\u00a0<\/p>\n It’s not a book that gives you a lot of faith in love and romance but there’s something so compelling about those characters that even though they’re prickly and miserable, you want to stick with them.<\/p>\n KE: As the book goes on, you learn more about these characters, and you reassess your sense of them and their relationships \u2014 that’s what you think the novel is doing, and you think you understand where it might be taking you.<\/p>\n And then something happens, and the book becomes something different again: a historical assessment of the geopolitical relationship between these countries, exploring hidden histories, violence and national identity. It’s lazy sometimes to call things ambitious, but it’s sure as hell ambitious.<\/p>\n CN: And it’s a page-turner! It’s nice to have what is in some ways a thriller on the Booker shortlist.<\/p>\n SL: It’s as much a thriller as Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake was last year, with quite edgy, misanthropic characters at the heart.<\/p>\n A sprawling love story Kiran Desai’s mother, Anita Desai, was also an author who was twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize. (Supplied: Penguin Books Australia)<\/p>\n SL: Sonia and Sunny are two young Indian nationals who move to America to study. The novel is a love story but it’s also a much bigger story about the place of India in the world. Both characters are writers, and they’re trying to figure out how to talk about their homeland without leaning into stereotypes.<\/p>\n CN: I found lots to like in this novel<\/a>. It’s really a big, sprawling love story \u2014 emphasis on the big \u2014 our key characters, Sonia and Sunny, don’t meet until about page 230.<\/p>\n Kiran Desai spent 20 years writing this book after she won the Booker for The Inheritance of Loss, and she really has thrown everything at it. While an impatient reader might get fed up waiting for Sonia and Sunny’s paths to cross, there’s so much to enjoy in the whole world of characters she’s populated this book with \u2014 their parents, their family, their friends, their other lovers.<\/p>\n KE: Desai has taken a love story and made it do all this other work. It’s called The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, but what does loneliness mean? Sonia’s grandparents are astonished that anybody could be lonely because they’re always surrounded by servants and visitors and noise.<\/p>\n Loneliness in the American context is about self-reliance, this presumption that you do everything on your own. The post-colonial literary stuff is sometimes really funny; there’s a real warmth and energy to it.<\/p>\n CN: It’s this epic and \u2014 that word again \u2014 ambitious novel. But it’s a book you enjoy spending time with because the characters are all so well-rounded.<\/p>\n An unreliable narrator Barack Obama included Audition in his 2025 summer reading list. (Supplied: Penguin Books Australia)<\/p>\n KE: Audition’s unnamed narrator is a fairly well-known actor, and she has a nervy, discomforting encounter at the beginning of the book with a younger man, Xavier. He presents himself as her lost son, but the truth of the narrative is undermined and upset over and over again, so we don’t quite know what’s going on and the whole story keeps shifting. I think confusion and being unsettled is the point of it.<\/p>\n DF: This is one where so much depends upon not knowing a lot about it going in, which I didn’t, and I approve of that approach.<\/p>\n SL: The main character is an actor for a reason. We’re exploring the roles we play in different parts of our lives, so we explore her role as a mother and a wife and as an actor. As Kate said, it is always shifting. We’re questioning her telling of it. She’s an unreliable narrator, and that’s where its surprise enticement comes from.<\/p>\n For me, I found the writing a bit too clinical; I didn’t engage with it. This idea that all the world’s a stage, Shakespeare dealt with that. I wasn’t lured into the framing of the novel.<\/p>\n DF: All Katie Kitamura’s narrators are women who are insecure about their roles in their lives. I fell in love with her writing when I read A Separation, her third novel. That’s the entry point I recommend to everyone.<\/p>\n This is her most stripped-back novel. It reads almost like a play; you could see it being one or two sets, a couple of characters. It reminds me of Australian author Jessica Au (Cold Enough for Snow<\/a>), where so much is left to the reader to fill in.\u00a0<\/p>\n Kitamura is interested in interior psychological abstraction, and it’s a very arch and ambiguous narrative voice. I adored this book. This is my favourite.<\/p>\n KE: But then there’s a big schism in the novel, and it’s difficult to work out if you’re supposed to reconcile the first and second halves. That may well be the point of it, but it threw me off kilter.<\/p>\n CN: It left me cold. We’re telling a story about the theatre, and I just felt like it didn’t have any life in it.<\/p>\n A road trip novel Protagonist Tommy realises “that he could have lived a totally different life, and that terrifies him”, Markovits tells ABC Radio National’s The Book Show. (Supplied: Allen & Unwin)<\/p>\n SL: The Rest of Our Lives is about Tom, whose wife cheated on him years ago. He’s sat with that knowledge for a long time, telling himself one day he’ll leave her, and the book opens on the day he does \u2014 he drives his youngest daughter to college, and he keeps on driving. It’s a road trip novel; he drives across America, meets old friends and lovers across the way, and tries to figure out how he feels about his marriage.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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