The Booker Prize 2025 winner will be revealed in London on Monday night (early Tuesday morning in India), capping months of speculation and reading marathons. The six shortlisted novels span continents and styles — from Kiran Desai’s return to fiction after two decades to David Szalay’s unsparing anatomy of masculinity — yet share a a deep, restless introspection that defines the fiction of our moment.
The Booker Shortlist
📌 Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny marks her first novel in nearly twenty years, a marquee of memory and migration that has made her the emotional favourite.
Here is what the former Booker winner said about her return to the Booker list, and her relationship with loneliness and fame, in conversation with Paromita Chakrabarti.
📌 Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter revisits Britain’s 1962 Big Freeze to test the tensile strength of love and endurance. His prose, cool and exact, glows beneath the frost. (Read the full review by Kaushik Das Gupta)
📌 Susan Choi’s Flashlight begins with a disappearance and expands into a multi-generational story of grief, exile and the narratives we invent to survive ourselves. (Read the full review by Pooja Pillai)
📌 Katie Kitamura’s Audition blurs life and performance in the mind of an actress who can no longer tell which is which. It’s a study in control and the cost of composure. (Read the full review by Paromita Chakrabarti)
The Booker Prize 2025 shortlist (Credit: Yuki Sugiura for Booker Prize Foundation)
📌 David Szalay’s Flesh strips modern masculinity to the bone — unsparing, almost forensic, a novel about being acted upon more than acting. (Read the full review by Aakash Joshi)
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📌 Benjamin Markovits’s The Rest of Our Lives takes the American road trip inward, following a middle-aged professor through fatigue, irony and fragile self-recognition. (Read the full review by Aishwarya Khosla)
The result is a shortlist of inward-looking novels. Desai leads the betting, with Miller and Markovits close behind, yet the Booker has a way of surprising those who think they’ve read the ending.
The winner will be announced in London on Monday, November 10, that’s Tuesday, November 11, 3 am IST.
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Aishwarya Khosla is a key editorial figure at The Indian Express, where she spearheads and manages the Books & Literature and Puzzles & Games sections, driving content strategy and execution. Aishwarya's specialty lies in book reviews, literary criticism and cultural commentary. She also pens long-form feature articles where she focuses on the complex interplay of culture, identity, and politics.
She is a proud recipient of The Nehru Fellowship in Politics and Elections. This fellowship required intensive study and research into political campaigns, policy analysis, political strategy, and communications, directly informing the analytical depth of her cultural commentary.
As the dedicated author of The Indian Express newsletters, Meanwhile, Back Home and Books 'n' Bits, Aishwarya provides consistent, curated, and trusted insights directly to the readership. She also hosts the podcast series Casually Obsessed. Her established role and her commitment to examining complex societal themes through a nuanced lens ensure her content is a reliable source of high-quality literary and cultural journalism.
Her extensive background across eight years also includes previous roles at Hindustan Times, where she provided dedicated coverage of politics, books, theatre, broader culture, and the Punjabi diaspora.
Write to her at aishwaryakhosla.ak@gmail.com or aishwarya.khosla@indianexpress.com. You can follow her on Instagram:
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The Booker Prize 2025 shortlist (Credit: Yuki Sugiura for Booker Prize Foundation)
