Former winner Kiran Desai makes the shortlist for this year’s Booker Prize, in another characteristically international list populated by well-established authors from across Europe, America and India, judges revealed tonight at a glittering public showcase held at London’s Royal Festival Hall.
The other shortlisted authors included the Americans Susan Choi, Katie Kitamura and Ben Markovits – all first-time nominees – as well as two previous shortlistees from Britain, Andrew Miller and David Szalay.
The judges, chaired by former Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle, unveiled the shortlist, which consists of the following novels: Flashlight by Susan Choi, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai, Audition by Katie Kitamura, The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits, The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller and Flesh by David Szalay.
Desai, who previously won the 2006 Booker Prize with her India-set novel The Inheritance of Loss, now resides in America after being raised in India and Britain. Szalay is of Hungarian heritage and divides his time between the UK and Hungary. A contingent from the US includes authors of immigrant parentage, such as Susan Choi – who is Korean-Jewish – and the Japanese-American Katie Kitamura.
Doyle remarked on the way the authors’ diverse backgrounds shaped their writing. “The authors are in total command of their own store of English, their own rhythm, their own expertise; they have each crafted a novel that no one else could have written,” he said.
Fairly recognisable names, all of the authors will be familiar to passing observers of the literary scene. “It is striking that the writers on this year’s powerful shortlist have spent decades honing their craft,” said Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation. “They are already much loved by readers and critics, writers of enormous commitment, curiosity and skill.” Accordingly, five out of six of the shortlisted books have been published by imprints at major publishing houses. Small and independent presses remain a limited presence, as in recent years.
Szalay is coming to be regarded as something like a laureate of masculinity. Following on from his successful, zeitgeisty novel All That Man Is (2016), Flesh watches a fatherless child enter a sexual relationship with an adult neighbour in a nameless Hungarian town, and seeks to be – as Szalay has said in an interview – “as honest as possible about what it’s actually like to be a male body in the world”. Our reviewer Sydney Diack said the book portrayed the way “an exploitative society fosters uncommunicative, unmoored men”.
Miller’s tenth novel The Land in Winter is set in the “Big Freeze” British winter of 1962. It starts with a character discovering the body of a younger man, dead by suicide, and spends the rest of its pages studying the quiet storms of discontent that lie beneath the outer placidity of many respectable lives.
Arguably the most anticipated novel on the shortlist is The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny – Desai’s first novel in 20 years. It is a story of love between two modern young Indians spanning years as their fates intersect and diverge across continents. It grapples with the ideas of tradition and modernity, India and the US, love and the complicated bonds that link generations together.
Should she win this year, Desai would become the fifth double winner in the prize’s 56-year existence, joining Margaret Atwood, Peter Carey, JM Coetzee and Hilary Mantel. It would also mean that India would secure an unprecedented clean sweep of 2025’s Booker Prizes, after author Banu Mushtaq and translator Deepa Bhasthi won the International Booker Prize for their short-story collection Heart Lamp earlier this year.
Although there are no debut authors on the shortlist, three novels are by first-time nominees – all American authors who only became eligible a decade ago.
Kitamura’s Audition is a mildly experimental novel about an actress’s enigmatic relationships. It is a surreal and disquieting novel about uneasy motherhood which gives full play to what The New Statesman’s reviewer Megan Nolan called Kitamura’s “confluence of style and ruthless intelligence”.
Markovits’ The Rest of Our Lives is his twelfth novel, focusing on the challenges of marriage and getting older, while questioning the identity and purpose of parents whose children are all grown-up. Markovits himself has gone from being a student to a professional basketball player-turned-novelist. The novel incorporates the idea of revisiting the past, taking its main character, Tom, on the road trip of a lifetime.
The theme of family also runs through Pulitzer-finalist Choi’s Flashlight. With the disappearance of a father during a holiday in a coastal town in Japan, a small family unit shatters. Upon their return to the US, the mystery of the unprecedented vanishing of the father slowly unravels as years go on.
Asked about the prominent presence of Americans on the list, judge and New Statesman contributor Chris Power said, “the English language is a victim of its own success so we have just got to acknowledge that it’s a global language and this is a global prize.”
The Booker Prize celebrates the best works of long-form fiction by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between 1 October 2024 and 30 September 2025. This year’s shortlist has been chosen from the longlist – known as ‘the Booker Dozen’ – of 13 titles, selected in turn from 153 submissions. The shortlisted authors each receive £2,500, and a specially bound edition of their book.
The winner will be announced at a ceremony on 10 November.
[Further reading: Samantha Harvey: “Orbital isn’t the kind of book that normally wins the Booker”]
Content from our partners
Related
Join the debate
Subscribe here to comment