{"id":31240,"date":"2025-07-29T14:25:10","date_gmt":"2025-07-29T14:25:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/31240\/"},"modified":"2025-07-29T14:25:10","modified_gmt":"2025-07-29T14:25:10","slug":"this-years-booker-prize-longlist-looks-in-new-directions-booker-prize","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/31240\/","title":{"rendered":"This year\u2019s Booker prize longlist looks in new directions | Booker prize"},"content":{"rendered":"

This year\u2019s Booker judges had a crowded field to pick from, with scores of eligible books from previously nominated writers and five new novels from winners alone (John Banville, Kiran Desai, Alan Hollinghurst, Ian McEwan and Ben Okri). Of these, Hollinghurst is one eyebrow-raising exclusion, for his elegiac and beautifully composed panorama of gay life in Britain over the past seven decades, Our Evenings<\/a>. But it\u2019s no surprise that the list is headed by Desai\u2019s epic The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny<\/a>, a novel in the works since her Booker win two decades ago and due out this September.<\/p>\n

Clocking in at nearly 700 pages, this is a love story about two people pulled between India and the US, family inheritance and personal ambition, intimacy and solitude. Immersive and gently funny, her vast canvas painted with an exquisitely fine brush, it looks like a leading contender on a canon-building list \u2013 nine of the authors are making their first Booker appearance. There is an emphasis on family stories; sometimes intimate and direct, as in Claire Adam\u2019s account of a woman forced to give up her baby as a teenager, Love Forms<\/a>, or Ben Markovits\u2019s rueful study of a father contemplating life once the kids have left home, The Rest of Our Lives<\/a>, but more often as a lens through which to examine the forces of history.<\/p>\n

Quick GuideThe Booker prize 2025 longlistShow<\/p>\n

Love Forms<\/a> by Claire Adam (Faber)<\/p>\n

The South<\/a> by Tash Aw (4th Estate)<\/p>\n

Universality<\/a> by Natasha Brown (Faber)<\/p>\n

One Boat by Jonathan Buckley (Fitzcarraldo Editions)<\/p>\n

Flashlight<\/a> by Susan Choi (Jonathan Cape)<\/p>\n

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai (Hamish Hamilton)<\/p>\n

Audition<\/a> by Katie Kitamura (Fern Press)<\/p>\n

The Rest of Our Lives<\/a> by Ben Markovits (Faber)<\/p>\n

The Land in Winter<\/a> by Andrew Miller (Sceptre)<\/p>\n

Endling<\/a> by Maria Reva (Virago)<\/p>\n

Flesh<\/a> by David Szalay (Jonathan Cape)<\/p>\n

Seascraper by Benjamin Wood (Viking)<\/p>\n

Misinterpretation by Ledia Xhoga (Daunt Books Originals)<\/p>\n

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Desai\u2019s novel is an intricate portrait of an interconnected world, while Tash Aw\u2019s The South<\/a>, the first in a proposed quartet, looks at two farming families in 1990s Malaysia against a backdrop of tumultuous change and ominous signs of climate crisis. Susan Choi\u2019s previous novel, 2019\u2019s Trust Exercise, was a standout in American fiction; Flashlight<\/a> is straighter and less playful, but scales up her ambition and breaks new ground in its examination of one family with roots in Korea, Japan and the US, illuminating the seismic effects of political upheaval on individual lives.<\/p>\n

The two debut novelists on the list respond to the forces of history with formal invention. Canadian-Ukrainian author Maria Reva begins Endling<\/a> as a comic caper through Ukraine\u2019s marriage industry, from the perspective of a cash-strapped scientist with a passion for endangered snails; Russia\u2019s full-scale invasion blows the book wide open, calling into question the role of the writer and the purpose of fiction \u2013 and offering answers that are full of energy. Albanian-American author Ledia Xhoga toys subtly with realism. Misinterpretation<\/a>, her portrait of an Albanian interpreter in New York, caught between two cultures and struggling with compassion fatigue and her own traumas as she tries to help others, is full of misunderstandings and missed connections that echo the faults and gaps of translation.<\/p>\n

Two slim, slippery books revel in formal disruption. Katie Kitamura\u2019s enigmatic Audition<\/a>, focusing on an American actor and a man young enough to be her son, offers contradictory narratives in order to explore identity, performance, and what we are to one another: this is a book to ponder and argue over. In Universality<\/a>, Natasha Brown is also interested in the power dynamics of storytelling: she constructs a merciless satire of the current media landscape, with its meretricious culture wars, through the jigsaw-puzzle chronicle of a long read that goes viral.<\/p>\n

The four remaining books are all by men, an answer perhaps to claims that male writing in the UK is in crisis, and they all do fascinating things with interiority. Jonathan Buckley writes spare, slightly Cuskian philosophical novels; in his 13th, One Boat<\/a>, a woman\u2019s sorties to Greece to work through her bereavements lead into reflections on ethics, memory and the processes of thought. In Benjamin Wood\u2019s quiet but immensely atmospheric Seascraper<\/a>, a young man plies his grandfather\u2019s trade of \u201cshanking\u201d, scraping the seashore for shrimp in an England that is moving on without him. Muted but precise prose burrows into his hopes and dreams for a tale that resonates far beyond the telling.<\/p>\n

Andrew Miller\u2019s The Land in Winter<\/a> is also situated in a postwar England on the brink of change, here the \u201cBig Freeze\u201d of 1962-3, and travels deep into the hearts of its characters, two young married couples in the West Country. This novel has had my heart since it was published last November, and I\u2019m delighted to see it on the list: I think it\u2019s the best book yet from a stellar writer who\u2019s been publishing for three decades. (By contrast, this year\u2019s Booker blow for me is the exclusion of Sarah Hall; I\u2019ve been telling everyone that her magisterial, millennia-spanning Helm, out at the end of August, was a likely winner.)<\/p>\n

The final title, also a favourite of mine this year, creates powerful effects through an unusual tactic: utterly refusing interiority. Flesh<\/a> by David Szalay is a very modern everyman story, with his central character at the mercy of forces beyond his control, a rise and fall playing out across a depressed childhood in Hungary, life in the army and an upwardly mobile stint in on-the-make London. By keeping his antihero a mystery to the reader, Szalay opens up the biggest questions about what we can and cannot know. It feels like something that hasn\u2019t been done before in quite this way \u2013 and that only fiction could do.<\/p>\n

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