Booker Prize 2025 shortlist: Opening lines from the six novels (including Kiran Desai’s)

The 2025 Booker Prize shortlist was announced on Tuesday, September 23. Kiran Desai’s novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, her first novel in 19 years since her Booker Prize-winning novel, The Inheritance of Loss, is on the shortlist.

The other novels on the shortlist are Flashlight by Susan Choi, Audition by Katie Kitamura, The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits, The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller, and Flesh by David Szalay.

The winning book will be announced on November 10 in London, and the winning author will receive £50,000.

Roddy Doyle, Chair of the Booker Prize 2025 judges, said, ‘The six [shortlisted books] have two big things in common. Their 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. And all of the books, in six different and very fresh ways, find their stories in the examination of the individual trying to live with – to love, to seek attention from, to cope with, to understand, to keep at bay, to tolerate, to escape from – other people. In other words, they are all brilliantly written and they are all brilliantly human.”

Three women and three men authors are on this year’s shortlist. They are...

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