Booker 2025

For much of her life, Dawn has felt as if something had been missing. Now, at the age of fifty-eight, with a divorce behind her and her two grown-up sons busy with their own lives, she should be trying to settle into a new future for herself. But she keeps returning to the past and to the secret she’s kept all these years. At just sixteen, Dawn found herself pregnant, and—as was common in Trinidad back then—her parents sent her away to have the baby and give her up for adoption.More than forty years later, Dawn yearns to reconnect with her lost daughter. But tracking down her child is not as easy as she had thought. It’s an emotional journey that leads Dawn to retrace her steps back home and to question not only that fateful decision she’d made as a teenager but every turn in the road of her life since.A heart-stirring novel about a mother's love, in all its forms, as a woman searches for the daughter she gave up for adoption when she was a teenager growing up in the Caribbean. Love Forms is a powerfully moving story of a woman in search of herself—a novel that rings with heartfelt empathy through the passages of a mother’s life, depicting the enduring bonds of love, family, and home.

When his grandfather dies, a boy named Jay travels south with his family to the property he left them, a once flourishing farm that has fallen into disrepair. The trees are diseased, the fields parched from months of drought.Still, Jay’s father, Jack, sends him out to work the land, or whatever land is left. Over the course of these hot, dense days, Jay finds himself drawn to Chuan, the local son of the farm’s manager, different from him in every way except for one.Out in the fields, and on the streets into town, the charge between the boys intensifies. Inside the house, the other family members confront their own regrets, and begin to drift apart. Like the land around them, they are powerless to resist the global forces that threaten to render their lives obsolete.At once sweeping and intimate, The South is a story of what happens when private and public lives collide.A radiant novel of longing that blooms between two boys over the course of one summer—about family, desire, and what we inherit—from celebrated author Tash Aw.

Remember—words are your weapons, they’re your tools, your currency: a twisty, slippery descent into the rhetoric of truth and power.Late one night on a Yorkshire farm, in the midst of an illegal rave, a young man is nearly bludgeoned to death with a solid gold bar.An ambitious young journalist sets out to uncover the truth surrounding the attack, connecting the dots between an amoral banker landlord, an iconoclastic columnist, and a radical anarchist movement that has taken up residence on the farm. She solves the mystery, but her viral exposé raises more questions than it answers. Who wrote it? Why? And how much of it is true? Through a voyeuristic lens, and with a simmering power, the book focuses in on what we say, how we say it, and what we really mean.Universality is a compelling, unsettling celebration of the spectacular, appalling force of language.It dares you to look away.Endorsements'powerful new voice in British Literature' — The Sunday Times

On losing her father, Teresa returns to a small town on the Greek coast — the same place she visited when grieving her mother nine years ago. She immerses herself again in the life of the town, observing the inhabitants going about their business, a quiet backdrop for her reckoning with herself. An episode from her first visit resurfaces vividly — her encounter with John, a man struggling to come to terms with the violent death of his nephew. Soon Teresa encounters some of the people she met last time: Petros, an eccentric mechanic whose life story may or may not be part of John's; the beautiful Niko, a diving instructor; and Xanthe, a waitress in one of the cafés on the leafy town square. They talk about their longings, regrets, the passing of time, their sense of who they are. Artfully constructed, absorbing and insightful, One Boat is a brilliant novel grappling with questions of identity, free will, guilt and responsibility.

One night, Louisa and her father take a walk on the beach. He’s carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later Louisa is found washed up by the tide, barely alive. Her father is gone, presumed drowned. She is ten years old.In chapters that shift from one member to the next, turning back again and again to that night by the sea, Susan Choi's Flashlight chases the shockwaves of one family’s catastrophe. Louisa is an only child of parents who have severed themselves from the past. Her father, Serk, an ethnic Korean born and raised in Japan, lost touch with his family when they bought into the promises of postwar Pyongyang and relocated to the DPRK. Her American mother, Anne, is estranged from her family after a reckless sexual adventure in her youth. And then there is Tobias, Anne’s illegitimate son, whose reappearance in their lives will have astonishing consequences.What really happened to Louisa’s father? Why did he take Louisa and her mother to Japan just before he disappeared? And how can we love, or make sense of our lives, when there’s so much we can’t see?A novel tracing a father’s disappearance across time, nations, and memory.

In the snowy mountains of Vermont, Sonia is lonely. A college student and aspiring writer homesick for India, she turns to an older artist for inspiration and intimacy, a man who will cast a dark spell on the next many years of her life. In Brooklyn, Sunny is lonely, too. A struggling journalist originally from Delhi, he is both beguiled and perplexed by his American girlfriend and the country in which he plans to find his future. As Sonia and Sunny each become more and more alienated, they begin to question their understanding of happiness, human connection, and where they belong.Back in India, Sonia and Sunny's extended families cannot fathom how anyone could be lonely in this great, bustling world. They arrange a meeting between the two—a clumsy meddling that only drives Sonia and Sunny apart before they have a chance to fall in love.The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is the sweeping tale of two young people navigating the many forces that shape their country, class, race, history, and the complicated bonds that link one generation to the next.The spellbinding story of two young people whose fates will intersect and diverge across continents and years—an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity. Behind every love story are the myriad stories of two families. A love story, a family saga, and a rich novel of ideas.EndorsementsBooker Prize-winning author of The Inheritance of Loss

Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an elegant and accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, and young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In Audition, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day—partner, parent, creator, muse—and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us best.One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. A mesmerizing Mobius strip of a novel that asks who we are to the people we love.

December 1962, a small village near Bristol.Eric and Irene and Bill and Rita. Two young couples living next to each other, the first in a beautiful cottage—suitable for a newly appointed local doctor—the second in a rundown, perennially under-heated farm. Despite their apparent differences, the two women (both pregnant) strike an easy friendship, a connection that comes as a respite from the surprising tediousness of married life, with its unfulfilled expectations, growing resentments and the ghosts of a recent past.But as one of the coldest winters on record grips England in a never-ending frost and as the country is enveloped in a thick, soft, unmoving layer of snow, the two couples find themselves cut off from the rest of the world. And without the small distractions of everyday existence, suddenly old tensions and shocking new discoveries threaten to change the course of their lives forever.A masterful, page-turning examination of the minutiae of life, The Land in Winter is a masterclass in storytelling — proof yet again that Andrew Miller is one of Britain's most dazzling chroniclers of the human heart.

Teenaged István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. Shy and new in town, he is a stranger to the social rituals practiced by his classmates and soon becomes isolated, with his neighbor—a married woman close to his mother’s age, whom he begrudgingly helps with errands—as his only companion. But as these periodical encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that István himself can barely understand, his life soon spirals out of control, ending in a violent accident that leaves a man dead.What follows is a rocky trajectory that sees István emigrate from Hungary to London, where he moves from job to job before finding steady work as a driver for London’s billionaire class. At each juncture, his life is affected by the goodwill or self-interest of strangers. Through it all, István is a calm, detached observer of his own life, and through his eyes we experience a tragic twist on an immigrant “success story,” brightened by moments of sensitivity, softness, and Szalay’s keen observation.Fast-paced and immersive, Flesh reveals István’s life through intimate moments, with lovers, employers, and family members, charted over the course of decades. As the story unfolds, the tension between what is seen and unseen, what can and cannot be said, hurtles forward until finally—with everything at stake—sudden tragedy again throws life as István knows it in jeopardy. Spare and penetrating, Flesh traces the imperceptible but indelible contours of unresolved trauma and its aftermath amid the precarity and violence of an ever-globalizing Europe with incisive insight, unyielding pathos, and startling humanity.EndorsementsFrom Booker Prize finalist David Szalay, a propulsive, hypnotic novel, about a man whose future is derailed by a series of events that he is unable to control.

Albania was a country that made you uneasy and tense, but alert and alive. It infuriated, exasperated, without apology or retribution, and yet one felt seen here, often even loved. The urge to escape its stifling confinement was tinged with unexpected melancholy – for foreigners and natives alike.In present-day New York City, an Albanian interpreter reluctantly agrees to work with Alfred, a Kosovar torture survivor, during his therapy sessions. Despite her husband’s cautions, she soon becomes entangled in her clients’ struggles: Alfred’s nightmares stir up her own buried memories, and an impulsive attempt to help a Kurdish poet leads to a risky encounter and a reckless plan.As ill-fated decisions stack up, jeopardising the nameless narrator’s marriage and mental health, she takes a spontaneous trip to reunite with her mother in Albania, where her life in the United States is put into stark relief. When she returns to face the consequences of her actions, she must question what is real and what is not.Ruminative and propulsive, Ledia Xhoga’s debut novel Misinterpretation interrogates the darker legacies of family and country, and the boundary between compassion and self-preservation.Endorsements‘Absolutely gorgeous. Taut as a thriller, lovely as a watercolor.’ — Jennifer Croft‘Deft and insightful . . . exceptional.’ — Idra Novey‘Xhoga interprets our brave, new multicultural world with a sly, benign wit. Read her novel. You’ll be glad you did.’ — Tom Grimes

Thomas lives a slow, deliberate life with his mother in Longferry, working his grandpa’s trade as a shanker. He rises early to take his horse and cart to the grey, gloomy beach and scrape for shrimp, spending the afternoon selling his wares, trying to wash away the salt and scum, pining for Joan Wyeth down the street, and rehearsing songs on his guitar. At heart, he is a folk musician, but it remains a private dream.When a striking visitor turns up, bringing the promise of Hollywood glamour, Thomas is shaken from the drudgery of his days and begins to see a different future. But how much of what the American claims is true, and how far can his inspiration carry Thomas?Haunting and timeless, this is the story of a young man hemmed in by his circumstances, striving to achieve fulfilment far beyond the world he knows.

Ukraine, 2022. Yeva is a loner and a maverick biologist who lives out of her mobile lab. She scours the country’s forests and valleys, trying and failing to breed rare snails while her relatives urge her to give up, settle down, and start a family. What they don’t know: Yeva already dates plenty of men—not for love, but to fund her work—entertaining Westerners who come to Ukraine on guided romance tours believing they’ll find docile brides uninfluenced by feminism and modernity.Nastia and her sister Solomiya are also entangled in the booming marriage industry, posing as a hopeful bride and her translator while secretly searching for their missing mother—a flamboyant protestor who vanished after years of fierce activism against the romance tours. So begins a journey of a lifetime across hundreds of miles: three angry women, a truckful of kidnapped bachelors, and Lefty, a last-of-his-kind snail with one final shot at perpetuating his species. But their plans come to a screeching halt as Russia invades.

When Tom Layward’s wife had an affair twelve years ago, he resolved to leave her as soon as his youngest child left the nest. Now, while driving his college-bound daughter to Pittsburgh, he remembers his promise to himself. He is also on the run from his own health issues and a forced leave from work.So, rather than returning to his wife in Westchester, Tom keeps driving west, with the vague plan of visiting people from his past—an old college friend, his ex-girlfriend, his brother, his son—en route, maybe, to California. He’s moving towards a future he hasn’t even envisioned yet while he considers his past and the choices he’s made that have brought him to this particular present. Pitch-perfect, tender, and keenly observed, The Rest of Our Lives is a story about what to do when the rest of your life is only just the beginning of your story.A triumphantly life-affirming road trip novel about a man at a crossroads in his life.EndorsementsFinalist for the 2025 Booker Prize“Feels less like reading a novel and more like sitting in a car beside a dear friend as he navigates the road up ahead. A profoundly moving experience.” — Ann Patchett“Deeply human... a beautifully quiet and devastating book.” — Sarah Jessica Parker