Women’s Prize for Fiction 2025: Six quick reviews of the shortlisted novels

Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis

At the heart of Fundamentally is the affinity that forms between narrator Nadia, appointed by the United Nations to rehabilitate “ISIS brides” in Iraq, and one of her subjects, Sara, an east Londoner on the cusp of adulthood.

They connect through a shared love of rollerblading, Dairy Milk and X-Men, as well as their caustic sense of humour. But the two British Muslim women have followed vastly different routes – Nadia to academia and the UN and Sara to a detention camp in Ninewah.

Nadia’s story of her journey through the vagaries of the humanitarian sector, punctuated by flashbacks to her failed relationship with first love Rosy and fraught relationship with her mother, is told with a compelling mix of verve and vulnerability. It raises hard ethical and political questions along the way. But it is Nadia’s mission to help Sara that gives the novel its emotional complexity and depth, drawing the reader in while denying us any easy answers.

Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout

Tell Me Everything is the tenth novel in Elizabeth Strout’s well-known series that sketches the lives of ordinary, yet complex characters, who enter and exit each other’s lives in the nowhere town of Crosby, Maine. The three main figures in this...

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