{"id":39256,"date":"2025-09-23T19:30:06","date_gmt":"2025-09-23T19:30:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/39256\/"},"modified":"2025-09-23T19:30:06","modified_gmt":"2025-09-23T19:30:06","slug":"as-a-booker-prize-judge-i-helped-whittle-153-books-down-to-a-shortlist-of-six-heres-why-you-should-read-them-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/39256\/","title":{"rendered":"As a Booker prize judge I helped whittle 153 books down to a shortlist of six. Here\u2019s why you should read them | Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Booker prize<\/a> is both a serious and celebratory undertaking. It should be, anyway, for those who care about literature, and I\u2019ve certainly found it to be so since I began reading this year\u2019s submissions on a stormy Devon beach on New Year\u2019s Eve (fun, but subsequently I relied on the books, not ambient conditions, to provide the drama).<\/p>\n

Now the shortlist is decided, I and my fellow judges \u2013 our chair, Roddy Doyle, who won the prize in 1993, the novelists Ay\u00f2b\u00e1mi Ad\u00e9b\u00e1y\u00f2 and Kiley Reid (both previous longlistees), and the actor, producer and publisher Sarah Jessica Parker<\/a> \u2013 struggle to believe 153 books have become just six, and that our monthly meetings to discuss form, content and font size are at an end.<\/p>\n

But our journey with this handful of extraordinary books continues, and journeys define them all in certain ways. In The Rest of Our Lives, by Ben Markovits, the law school professor Tom Layward drives his daughter to college and doesn\u2019t stop, embarking on a pan-American odyssey that\u2019s also an exploration of the self. Markovits\u2019s America is peopled by divorcees who, like Dante\u2019s pilgrim, have reached the middle of their lives only to discover they\u2019re lost. The book is very funny and very sad, and Tom is a brilliantly realised character; someone you want to both listen to and argue with.<\/p>\n

You might also find yourself wanting to argue with Istv\u00e1n, whose life story unfolds in David Szalay\u2019s novel Flesh. But given that he\u2019s someone who makes the phrase \u201ca man of few words\u201d seem wildly over the top, it probably wouldn\u2019t last long. From his teenage years in Hungary to a tour of Iraq, his time as a doorman, driver and bodyguard, and his ascension to the ranks of the super-rich, Istv\u00e1n\u2019s compelling story offers a striking portrait of modern Britain and explores desire and the limits of agency in prose stripped almost to the bone. This is a novel that shows how strongly character can be evoked with only scraps of what is typically the novel\u2019s bumper crop: interiority.<\/p>\n

Kiran Desai\u2019s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny covers a much briefer span of time than Flesh \u2013 it begins in the mid-1990s and ends around 2002 \u2013 but has the feel, and at nearly 700 pages, the size, of a multigenerational epic. For all the book\u2019s great scope, though, no detail is too granular to escape Desai\u2019s notice. Through the love story of its two main characters, Indians torn between America and home, the book explores and enacts the tension between two paths for Indian fiction, social realism and magical realism, and fuses them to original and enthralling effect.<\/p>\n

Social faultlines are everywhere in Andrew Miller\u2019s The Land in Winter, set in the West Country during the punishing winter of 1962. Miller moves hypnotically between the surface of things \u2013 the work of a rural GP, of an inexperienced dairy farmer, of a woman discovering the demands and empty stretches of housewifery \u2013 and the deep currents of their desires. The two couples at the centre of the novel are as frozen as the landscape in which Miller places them, but huge changes are coming for them all \u2013 and the country in which they live.<\/p>\n

The major change in Louisa Kang\u2019s life \u2013 her near drowning, and the loss of her father \u2013 is described right at the outset of Susan Choi\u2019s Flashlight, which proceeds to chart the events leading to and resulting from that calamity. This is both a historical novel on a grand scale, beginning in immediately postwar Japan and ending more or less in the present day, and a deeply intimate one. Through the interrelations between Louisa and her parents, the Korean Japanese academic Serk and white American Anne, Choi gives us a deeply affecting account of a family spinning in history\u2019s wake.<\/p>\n

A mother, father and child also occupy the centre of Katie Kitamura\u2019s Audition. Or do they? This challenging, ingenious novel, in which things are tense, verging on menacing, from the first page, begins with an actor, in rehearsals for a new Broadway play, having lunch with a young man who believes she is his mother. As well as being about the relationship between parents and children, this is a novel that takes our claims for art \u2013 that it opens a space of possibility, probes at taboos, shows us other ways of being \u2013 and makes them thrillingly literal. Like all its companions on this year\u2019s shortlist, the questions and moods it summons live on long after the book is closed.<\/p>\n

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The 2025 Booker prize winner is announced on 10 November<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Booker prize is both a serious and celebratory undertaking. It should be, anyway, for those who care…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":39257,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[288,93,61,60],"class_list":{"0":"post-39256","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39256"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39256\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39257"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}