International Booker 2025

A Leopard-Skin Hat is the story of an intense friendship between the narrator and his close childhood friend, Fanny, who suffers from profound psychological disorders.A series of short scenes paints the portrait of a strong-willed and tormented young woman battling many demons, and of the narrator’s loving and anguished attachment to her. Serre poignantly depicts the bewildering back and forth between hope and despair involved in such a relationship, while playfully calling into question the very form of the novel. Written in the aftermath of the death of the author’s little sister, A Leopard-Skin Hat is both the celebration of a tragically foreshortened life and a valedictory farewell, written in Anne Serre’s signature style.A Leopard-Skin Hat may be Anne Serre’s most moving novel yet.Endorsements“A masterpiece of simplicity, emotion and elegance.” — Le Point

On a Woman’s Madness tells the story of Noenka, a courageous Black woman trying to live a life of her own choosing. When her abusive husband of just nine days refuses her request for divorce, Noenka flees her hometown in Suriname, on South America’s tropical northeastern coast, for the capital city of Paramaribo. Unsettled and unsupported, her life in this new place is illuminated by romance and new freedoms, but also forever haunted by her past and society’s expectations.Strikingly translated by Lucy Scott, Astrid Roemer’s classic queer novel is a tentpole of European and post-colonial literature. And amid tales of plantation-dwelling snakes, rare orchids, and star-crossed lovers, it is also a blistering meditation on the cruelties we inflict on those who disobey. Who is Noenka? Roemer asks us. “I’m Noenka,” she responds resolutely, “which means Never Again.”EndorsementsFinalist, National Book Award for Translated LiteratureWinner, Dutch Literature PrizeWinner, P. C. Hooft Award“Roemer makes her English-language debut with this classic of queer Black literature… As Roemer pushes at the boundaries of the senses, she melds biting postcolonial social commentary with a lush dreamscape. Scott’s translation is a gift to English-language readers.” — Publishers Weekly

Millennial expat couple Anna and Tom are living the dream in Berlin, in a bright, plant-filled apartment in Neukölln. They are young digital creatives, freelancers without too many constraints. They have a passion for food, progressive politics, sexual experimentation and Berlin's twenty-four-hour party scene. Their ideal existence is also that of an entire generation, lived out on Instagram, but outside the images they create for themselves, dissatisfaction and ennui burgeon. Their work as graphic designers becomes repetitive. Friends move back home, have children, grow up. An attempt at political activism during the refugee crisis proves fruitless. And in that picture-perfect life Anna and Tom feel increasingly trapped, yearning for an authenticity and a sense of purpose that seem perennially just out of their grasp.With the stylistic mastery of Georges Perec and the nihilism of Michel Houellebecq, Perfection, translated by Sophie Hughes, is a sociological novel about the emptiness of contemporary existence, beautifully written, brilliantly scathing.

In the distant future, humans are on the verge of extinction and have settled in small tribes across the planet under the observation and care of "Mothers." Some children are made in factories, from cells of rabbits and dolphins; some live by getting nutrients from water and light, like plants. The survival of the race depends on the interbreeding of these and other alien beings—but it is far from certain that connection, love, reproduction, and evolution will persist among the inhabitants of this faltering new world.Unfolding over fourteen interconnected episodes spanning geological eons, at once technical and pastoral, mournful and utopic, Under the Eye of the Big Bird presents an astonishing vision of the end of our species as we know it.From one of Japan's most brilliant and sensitive contemporary novelists, this speculative fiction masterpiece envisions an Earth where humans are nearing extinction and rewrites our understanding of reproduction, ecology, evolution, artificial intelligence, communal life, creation, love, and the future of humanity.

Born with a congenital muscle disorder, Shaka spends her days in her room in a care home outside Tokyo, relying on an electric wheelchair to get around and a ventilator to breathe. But if Shaka's physical life is limited, her quick, mischievous mind has no limits: she takes e-learning courses on her iPad, publishes explicit fantasies on websites, and anonymously troll-tweets to see if anyone is paying attention ('If I were to live again, I'd want to be a high-class prostitute'). One day, she tweets into the void an offer of an enormous sum of money for a sperm donor. To her surprise — and ours — her new nurse accepts the dare, unleashing a series of events that will forever change Shaka's sense of herself as a woman in the world.Hunchback is a feminist story about the dignity of an individual who insists on her right to make choices for herself, no matter the consequences. Formally creative and refreshingly unsentimental, Hunchback depicts the joy, anger, and desires of a woman demanding autonomy in a world that doesn't always grant it to people like her.Full of wit, bite, and heart, this unforgettable novel reminds us all of the full potential of our lives, no matter the limitations we experience.EndorsementsWinner of the Akutagawa Prize.

In November 2021, an inflatable dinghy carrying migrants from France to the United Kingdom capsized in the Channel, causing the death of 27 people on board. Despite receiving numerous calls for help, the French authorities wrongly told the migrants they were in British waters and told them they had to call the British authorities for help. By the time rescue vessels arrived on the scene, all but two of the migrants had died. The narrator of Delecroix’s fictional account of the events is the woman who took the calls. Accused of failing in her duty, she refuses to be held more responsible than others for this disaster. Why should she be more responsible than the sea, than the war, than the crises behind these tragedies? A shocking, moral tale of our times, Small Boat reminds us of the power of fiction to illuminate our darkest crimes.

Life’s a bitch. That’s why you gotta rattle her cage, even if she’s foaming at the mouth.In the linked stories of Reservoir Bitches, thirteen Mexican women prod the bitch that is Life as they fight, sew, skirt, cheat, cry, and lie their way through their tangled circumstances. From the all-powerful daughter of a cartel boss to the victim of transfemicide, from a houseful of spinster seamstresses to a socialite who supports her politician husband by faking Indigenous roots, these women spit on their own reduction and invent new ways to survive, telling their stories in bold, unapologetic voices. At once social critique and black comedy, Reservoir Bitches is a raucous debut from one of Mexico’s most thrilling new writers.A debut linked story collection of gritty, streetwise, and wickedly funny fiction from Mexico.

Based on Cărtărescu's own experience as a teacher, Solenoid submerges us in the mundane details of a diarist's life and spirals into an existential account of history, philosophy and mathematics.Grounded in the reality of communist Romania, it grapples with frightening health care, the absurdities of the education system and the struggles of family life, while investigating other universes and forking paths. In a surreal journey like no other, we visit a tuberculosis preventorium, an anti-death protest movement, a society of dream investigators and a minuscule world of dust mites living on a microscope slide. Combining fiction with autobiography and history, Solenoid searches for escape routes through the alternate dimensions of life and art, as various monstrous realities erupt within the present.

In 1980s Réunion, monsters lurk beneath the surface of vibrant island life, ready to pounce at the slightest disturbance.‘In the heat of the Tropic of Capricorn, on the flanks of an active volcano, the sharks would tear apart your favourite magazine if only they could crawl as far as your beach towel.’Here, the naïve Dessaintes couple make a failing bid for happiness, soon growing jaded and bitter as the orange tree in their front yard — ‘the branches laden with flowers, the juicy oranges and, eventually, the nests of insatiable weaverbirds and the stench of rotten fruit.’Even so, sprouting defiantly through the cracks of this postcolonial legacy of violence, poverty and intergenerational trauma, the Dessaintes’ daughter shows an irrepressible zest for life. Amidst the chaos raging behind and beyond the door of her childhood home, our young narrator stubbornly resists her parents’ refrain, ‘that’s the way it is and that’s that!’Finding refuge in reading and determined to write her own story, she falls in love with words — ‘a group of jumbled black arabesques was dancing on a little white wall ... I worshipped them as sacred beings.’With clear-eyed, offbeat, buoyant humour, Bélem plunges us into a vivid world of extremes where, ‘quiet times and places are rare.’

Tara Selter, the heroine of On the Calculation of Volume, has involuntarily stepped off the train of time: in her world, November eighteenth repeats itself endlessly. We meet Tara on her 122nd November 18th: she no longer experiences the changes of days, weeks, months, or seasons. She finds herself in a lonely new reality without being able to explain why: how is it that she wakes every morning into the same day, knowing to the exact second when the blackbird will burst into song and when the rain will begin? Will she ever be able to share her new life with her beloved and now chronically befuddled husband? And on top of her profound isolation and confusion, Tara takes in with pain how slight a difference she makes in the world. (As she puts it: “That’s how little the activities of one person matter on the eighteenth of November.”)Solvej Balle’s seven-volume novel wrings enthralling and magical new dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal subjects.

What if all Palestinians vanished from their homeland overnight?Alaa, a young Palestinian, is haunted by his grandmother’s memories of being displaced from Jaffa and becoming a refugee in her homeland. Ariel, Alaa’s neighbour and friend, is a liberal Zionist, critical of the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza yet faithful to the project of Israel. When he wakes up one morning to find that all Palestinians have suddenly vanished, Ariel begins searching for clues to the secret of the collective disappearance; that search, and his reaction to it, intimately reveal the fissures at the heart of the Palestinian question. Between the stories of Alaa and Ariel are the people of Jaffa and Tel Aviv against whose ordinary lives these fissures and questions play out.Spare yet evocative, intensely intelligent in its interplay of perspectives, The Book of Disappearance is an unforgettable glimpse into contemporary Palestine.

Realising he and she are the very worst kind of people, our unnamed middle-aged narrator embarks on a highly dubious road trip through Switzerland with his terminally ill and terminally drunken mother. They try unsuccessfully to give away or squander the fortune she has amassed from investing in armaments industry shares. Along the journey they bicker endlessly over the past, throw handfuls of francs into a ravine, and exasperate the living daylights out of their long-suffering taxi driver. The crimes of the twentieth century are never far behind, but neither is the need for more vodka.Eurotrash is a bitterly comic, vertiginous mirror-cabinet of familial and historical reckoning. Kracht's novel is a narrative tour-de-force of the tenderness and spite meted out between two people who cannot escape one another.

In Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. Published originally in the Kannada, these portraits of family and community tensions testify to Mushtaq’s years as a journalist and lawyer, in which she tirelessly championed women’s rights and protested all forms of caste and religious oppression. Written in a style at once witty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating, it is in her characters — the sparky children, the audacious grandmothers, the buffoonish maulvis and thug brothers, the oft-hapless husbands, and the mothers above all, surviving their feelings at great cost — that Mushtaq emerges as an astonishing writer and observer of human nature, building disconcerting emotional heights out of a rich spoken style. Her opus has garnered both censure from conservative quarters as well as India’s most prestigious literary awards.This is a collection sure to be read for years to come.EndorsementsLonglisted for the International Booker Prize 2025