Booker Prize 2025 Longlist: 13 Incredible Books To Read Now

If you’re looking for books to get you through the rest of 2025, there’s no better answer than the longlist for this year’s Booker Prize. The prestigious literary award honours the best work of fiction written in English and published in the UK between 1 October 2024 to 30 September 2025. 

This year, there were over 150 submissions, and five judges—consisting of Roddy Doyle (Chair and 1993 Booker prize winner); author Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀; actress Sarah Jessica Parker, author Chris Power; and author Kiley Reid—narrowed it down to just 13 books, known as the Booker Dozen.

Notably, this year’s longlist is the most global lineup as it features the highest number of nationalities in a decade, such as Malaysia, India, Albania, Trinidad, and more. 

“There are short novels and some very long ones. There are novels that experiment with form and others that do so less obviously. Some of them examine the past, and others poke at our shaky present. They are all alive with great characters and narrative surprises. All, somehow, examine identity, individual or national, and all, I think, are gripping and excellent,” said Doyle.

Without further ado, here are 13 eye-opening books from the 2025 Booker Prize longlist to check out now.

Claire Adam, Love Forms 

Dawn is 58, freshly divorced, and trying to settle into her new future. But she keeps going back to the one decision she made when she was 16 years old: giving birth and giving her child up for adoption. 40 years later, Dawn yearns to connect with her lost daughter and begins a journey of finding her that will take her from London to Venezuela and Trinidad in this heart-stirring story about a mother’s love and the choices we make in life.

Tash Aw, The South 

After the death of his grandfather, a teenager named Jay travels with his family to a dilapidated farm in Southern Malaysia. There, he meets Chuan, the farm manager’s son. Told over the course of one sweltering summer, The South depicts the longing that blooms between the two boys—about broken families, deep desire, and what we inherit. This novel is the first book of a planned quartet.

Natasha Brown, Universality 

During an illegal rave, a man is bludgeoned to death with a gold bar on a Yorkshire farm. An ambitious journalist sets out to uncover the truth behind the attack and cracks the case—but soon gets sucked into a war of semantics and rhetoric when her exposé goes viral. Universality examines the spectacular yet dangerous force of language and the power of words.

Jonathan Buckley, One Boat 

After losing her father, Teresa ventures back to a small coastal town in Greece, where she first visited nine years ago while grieving her mother. While immersing herself in the town again, she encounters familiar faces and reflects with them on topics such as loss, identity, guilt, and the passing of time. 

Susan Choi, Flashlight 

10-year-old Louisa Kang’s life changed one day when a father-daughter trip went wrong in Japan. One morning, she washes up on the beach alone, and her father is presumed to have drowned. Flashlight tracks the years of Louisa and her family’s life after being rocked by a devastating tragedy, spanning continents, personal memory, and generational history. 

Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny 

Booker Prize 2006 winner Kiran Desai returns with a spellbinding novel of two young people whose fates will intersect and diverge across continents and years. Sonia is a recent graduate of a writing program in Vermont, while Sonny is a journalist in New York. At 650 pages, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is an epic tale of family and love, India and America, tradition and modernity.

Katie Kitamura, Audition

An aspiring actress and art critic meet for lunch at a restaurant. Despite its simple and minimal setting, Audition’s dual narrative invites us to examine the performances we put on in life, the social roles we play, and whether we really know the people we love. 

Ben Markovits, The Rest of Our Lives 

When his daughter leaves the nest for college, Tom Layward finally makes good on his plan to separate from his wife, a decision he has delayed for over a decade for the sake of his children. Now in his fifties, Tom drives west and embarks on a road trip of self-discovery and new beginnings.

Andrew Miller, The Land in Winter 

Set in the Big Freeze of 1962 to 1963, the lives of two neighbouring couples are changed in irrevocable ways. A local doctor hides secrets while a newlywed couple tries to make the most of their new life in a run-down farmhouse. When an ordinary cold turns into a violent blizzard, the two couples, trapped by the weather, find their lives beginning to unravel in this stunning study of the human heart.

Maria Reva, Endling

Three women, one truck of kidnapped bachelors, and one last-of-its-kind snail. Such is the eccentric ensemble of Maria Reva’s whirlwind debut novel, which tracks a road trip across contemporary Ukraine on the edge of war. Yeva is a biologist who funds her research on rare snails through commercial romance tours. When she crosses paths with Nastia and Solomiya, two women posing as members of the marriage industry, who are looking for their missing activist mother, they take a detour of a lifetime.

David Szalay, Flesh 

Flesh follows a young boy named István who grows up with his mother in a housing estate in Hungary. There, he forms a clandestine relationship with his only close companion, a middle-aged married woman. Soon, his life spirals out of control, and István finds himself moving up the ranks to the circle of London’s rich and elite, shaped by desires he only partly grasps—until this life threatens to undo him completely. This is not your typical rags-to-riches story.

Benjamin Wood, Seascraper

In a sleepy coastal town in northern England, Thomas earns a living by taking up his grandfather’s trade as a shanker, scraping shrimp off the beach. Unbeknownst to the small community, he has hopes of being a musician, rehearsing songs and playing his guitar in private. When a visitor arrives, bringing the promise of Hollywood glamour and the chance for Thomas to trade the monotony of his life for artistic fulfilment, the young man must decide if he can break free from the confines of class, identity, and family loyalty to live the life he dreams. 

Ledia Xhoga, Misinterpretation

As one of only two debut works in the longlist this year, Xhoga’s Misinterpretation is a probing novel that interrogates the darker legacies of family and country. In present-day New York City, an Albanian interpreter reluctantly agrees to translate therapy sessions for a Kosovo torture survivor. However, the work reopens memories of her past and leads her down a dangerous path. When she travels to Albania to visit her mother, the unnamed narrator is confronted by the stark differences between their lives and must question what is real and what is not in this timeless and haunting story of the immigrant experience.

The shortlist of the six finalists will be announced for the first time at a public event on 23 September 2025 at Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall in London. Each shortlisted author will receive £2,500 and a specially bound edition of their book. 

The winning book will be announced on 10 November 2025, with a grand prize of  £50,000. The award will be livestreamed on the Booker Prize’s official channels.

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