SHORTLIST 2025
Everything you need to know about the Booker Prize 2025
As the Booker Prize 2025 shortlist is announced, we’ve picked out the most interesting facts, trends and themes that have emerged in this year’s selection. So here’s everything you need to know about Booker Prize 2025 shortlist nominees.
DAVID SZALAY
SUSAN CHOI
KIRAN DESAI
KATIE KITAMURA
BEN MARKOVITS
ANDREW MILLER
THE 2025 BOOKER PRIZE WINNER
FLESH BY DAVID SZALAY
Fifteen-year-old István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. New to the town and shy, he is unfamiliar with the social rituals at school and soon becomes isolated, with his neighbour – a married woman close to his mother’s age – as his only companion. Their encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that István barely understands, and his life soon spirals out of control. As the years pass, he is carried gradually upwards on the 21st century’s tides of money and power, moving from the army to the company of London’s super-rich, with his own competing impulses for love, intimacy, status and wealth winning him unimaginable riches, until they threaten to undo him completely. Spare and penetrating, Flesh asks profound questions about what drives a life: what makes it worth living, and what breaks it.
The Booker Prize 2025: The Judges
Wondering which of the six Booker Prize 2025 shortlisted novels to read first? We asked our judges to tell us what they loved about the books – and why you’ll love them too.
Everything you need to know about the 2025 shortlist
