This year’s Booker Prize has been controversial. Not for the first time. Judges have walked out previously after their choice was rejected, claiming that the thing is stitched up. This year’s thirteen-book longlist, unveiled on 29 July, was puffed as being more international, but the overall tone on social media comment pages has been disappointment at the relatively low standard.

The six-book shortlist was announced on 23 September, and the winner will be garlanded on 10 November. But you don’t have to wait, because I will now tell you who I think the 2025 winner should be, and give a rank order of the runners up, down to the worst, aiming to describe them briefly without spoilers. Here goes.

Top three

I would give the first prize to Booker shortlisted Kiran Desai’s 2025 The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. This is one of the controversial listed books because it was not published here until after the shortlist was announced. But it was worth the wait. It breaks free of the unpromising title to give us a love story embedded in colonial and post-colonial life mainly set in India and the United States, but travelling to other places too.

Almost every crafted sentence is composed of dialectically-entwined opposites, sometimes as paradoxes and sometimes as double-binds. It is a beautifully written big big book with many sharp observations on history and contemporary politics that ranges over the world carrying the characters back and forth until they finally find themselves.

Second place goes to the Booker long-listed but shamefully not short-listed Maria Reva’s Endling. It is a caustic and sometimes very funny reminder of the attempted Russian erasure of Ukraine – the ‘endling’ of a nation-state – told through a weird combination of narrative devices and some tangled feminist-activist and, yes, ecological snail-focused subplots.

This was also controversial because a German book was published a few years back, as yet untranslated, with the same title, and with some of the same themes. But this is great. It is a compelling anger-driven counter-memory antidote to Putin’s nationalist attempt to retain his own grip on power as well as the West’s romanticising and sexualising harvesting of somewhere apparently so far yet so close.

Third place goes to Booker longlisted but, again, not short-listed, Benjamin Wood’s (2025) Seascraper. This is a real sink-pit of a book, and in a surprisingly good way. Set on the northwest English coast, it lures you into a limited life in the cold sea, the main character scraping a living but a shrimp among the industrialised big-timers down the coast.

Then, without warning, you are sucked in and down into the poignant plot, and into themes of care for others and redemptive outreach to quite different lives and possibilities.

The other three of my shortlist

Tash Aw’s The South wasn’t short-listed either, but should have been. It neatly counterposes urban and rural precarious existence in Malaysia, focusing on the Chinese community, and brings queer desire to life, with some keenly-observed contrasting perspectives on the characters, also attending to class relations. The book has a dramatic opening which distances the reader, but this teases us and then draws us in.

Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter, shortlisted by Booker, is a slow burner, with lots of detailed scene setting, of cold south west England in the early 1960s, and then a dissection of entangled lives – marriages, affairs, distress and hope – showing well the necessary interdependence of relationships and experience and here, less than two decades after the opening of the camps, the rippling impact of genocide in Europe during the Second World War.

And the last one in my short-list, not on the Booker shortlist: Natasha Brown, in Universality, really gets under the skin of the already middle-class and hopeful upwardly-mobile and still seethingly precariously-resentful literary and media festival circuit-hoppers.

Set in the UK, it shows us what these people think about us, the contempt and class-hatred that is then refracted into ‘anti-woke’ suspicion of any progressive political movement that might actually change things. The book is so acutely observed, so convincing an insider view, that I felt contaminated being brought so close to the unpleasant characters that populate it, this is satire that risks replicating what it describes.

The rest of the Booker long list

Katie Kitamura’s Audition was also shortlisted. It is an unsettling verging on creepy novel set in New York by an unreliable narrator tracing the vertiginous shift from the framing of interaction as being like a performance, the ‘dramaturgical’ metaphor, into the dissolution of self on the intimate stage of family interaction; the sense that the parts one plays are not always self-authored is uncannily well captured. It is interesting, but I’m really uncertain whether to recommend this and inflict on others.

Not shortlisted by Booker was Jonathan Buckley’s (2025) One Boat. It gives us what is ostensibly a double-layered account of relational crisis visits to a Greek coastal village, but the book turns out to be triple-layered, something which rather annoyingly explains the mannered italicised reflexive meditations that are interspersed through the text.

The author inhabits the subjectivity of someone making sense of their world as mediated by their gaze on the village (and one wonders whether this merely replicates such a visit by a tourist writer in residence). Not uninteresting, is the best I can say.

Booker short-listed Susan Choi’s Flashlight (2025) has all the characteristics of a ‘family romance’, fantasised wish-fulfilment which weaves the story of loss and reunification (with some unfortunate over-done anti-communist motifs about the undoubtedly cruel North Korean state) with tedious rambling about who married who and what children they had next. Hard work, too long, give it a miss.

Not Booker short-listed, Ledia Xhoga’s Misinterpretation has the pathologically helpful main character drawn into agonisingly unwise entangled relationships. In short sentences. And bare descriptions. From the ‘write what you know’ school of creative writing. It should be interesting, set in the Albanian émigré community in New York, and involving a trip back to Tirana, but it wastes the opportunity. There are multiple scenarios mapped out and unwoven, so it reads like a draft.

Also not Booker short-listed, Claire Adams’ 2025 Love Forms is a book that cannot end fast enough. This was a controversial as a long-listed book because one of the judges had already been involved in publishing the thing. A Trinidad set memoir, the false folksy first person narrative is about what the author might recollect – “what I’m getting to,” “what I’m saying,” “what I’m trying to say” – with interminable family life padding while we wait to get to the denouement of will she won’t she connect with a daughter given up for adoption (with some weird diplomatic silences about what was actually happening in Venezuela as she grew up); either way, whatever outcome, it will feel that the journey was disappointingly pointless and eventually predictable.

Booker short-listed David Szalay’s Flesh is basically a life history of a young man from a Hungarian housing estate unconvincingly tracking possible traumatic effects of an early sexual liaison with a neighbour and then exposure to violence in the army. Our hero makes good and then loses what he has made of himself, but can only respond to questions about what he has experienced with a blank “Okay.” This repetitive word haunts the novel, speaks of a lack of depth, makes it not recommended, merely okay.

Last and least is Booker short-listed Ben Markovits’ The Rest of Our Lives immerses the reader in contemporary US American culture, nice if you’re into that kind of thing, first subjecting them to something akin to being subjected to the autobiographical ramblings of a stranger at a bad party, then making them hear about a dire road trip through unappealing places, then degenerating into an account of medical diagnosis. As pointless a read as it is of a life.

Conclusions

There were some real clunkers this year. You’ll no doubt disagree with my rating of the thirteen offered up by the Booker judges. I disagreed with the choice of the winner of the Booker 2024 list, but did agree with their decision on the 2022 winner. I want a book that is written in such a way as to draw you into it, that draws you into a different world than the one I live in, but which also in some way engages with the world. Not much to ask is it.

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