The longlist has been selected by the 2025 judging panel, chaired by critically acclaimed writer and 1993 Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle. This year’s selection, which was chosen from 153 submissions, celebrates the best works of long-form fiction by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between 1 October 2024 and 30 September 2025.
Booker Prize Longlist 2025
Love Forms
Claire Adam | 9780571339556 | Faber and Faber | TPB
In the heart-aching new novel from the author of the award-winning Golden Child, a mother searches for the daughter she left behind a lifetime ago.
Trinidad, 1980: Dawn Bishop, aged 16, leaves her home and journeys across the sea to Venezuela. There, she gives birth to a baby girl, and leaves her with nuns to be given up for adoption.
Dawn tries to carry on with her life – a move to England, a marriage, a career, two sons, a divorce – but through it all, she still thinks of the child she had in Venezuela, and of what might have been.
Then, forty years later, a woman from an internet forum gets in touch. She says that she might be Dawn’s long-lost daughter, stirring up a complicated mix of feelings: could this be the person to give form to all the love and care a mother has left to offer?
Misinterpretation
Ledia Xhoga | 9781917092180 | Daunt Books | PB
It is essential in our line of work to keep our clients’ best interests in mind, as they are in a vulnerable position.
In New York City, an Albanian interpreter cannot help but become entangled in her clients’ struggles, despite her husband’s cautions. When she reluctantly agrees to work with Alfred, a Kosovar torture survivor, during his therapy sessions, his nightmares stir up her own buried memories; while an impulsive attempt to help a Kurdish poet leads to a risky encounter and a reckless plan.
As ill-fated decisions stack up, jeopardising the nameless narrator’s marriage and mental health, she takes a spontaneous trip to reunite with her mother in Albania, where her life in the United States is put into stark relief. When she returns to face the consequences of her actions, she must question what is real and what is not.
Ruminative and propulsive, Misinterpretation interrogates the darker legacies of family and country, and the boundary between compassion and self-preservation.
Coming Soon!
The Rest of Our Lives
Ben Markovits | 9780571388547 | Faber & Faber | HB
What’s left when your kids grow up and leave home?
When Tom Layward’s wife had an affair he resolved to leave her as soon as his youngest daughter turned eighteen. Twelve years later, while taking her to Pittsburgh to start university, he remembers his pact, and keeps driving West.
An unforgettable road trip novel, The Rest of Our Lives beautifully explores the nuance and complications of a long term marriage.
Coming Soon!
Endling
Maria Reva | 9780349012728 | Virago | TPB
An unforgettable debut novel about the journey of three women and one extremely endangered snail through contemporary Ukraine.
Ukraine, 2022. Yeva is a maverick scientist who scours the country’s forests and valleys, trying and failing to breed rare snails while her relatives urge her to settle down and start a family of her own. What they don’t know: Yeva already dates plenty of men-not for love, but to fund her work-entertaining Westerners who come to Ukraine on guided romance tours believing they’ll find docile brides untainted by feminism.
Nastia and her sister, Solomiya, are also entangled in the booming marriage industry, posing as a hopeful bride and her translator while secretly searching for their missing mother, who vanished after years of fierce activism against the romance tours.
So begins a journey of a lifetime across a country on the brink of war: three angry women, a truckful of kidnapped bachelors, and Lefty, a last-of-his-kind snail with one final shot at perpetuating his species.
Available in Store!
The South
Tash Aw | 9780008637613 | Fourth Estate | TPB
A radiant novel of the longing that blooms between two boys over the course of one summer – about family, desire, and what we inherit – from celebrated author Tash Aw.
When his grandfather dies, a boy named Jay travels south with his family to the property he left them, a once flourishing farm that has fallen into disrepair. The trees are diseased, the fields parched from months of drought.
Still, Jay’s father, Jack, sends him out to work the land, or whatever land is left. Over the course of these hot, dense days, Jay finds himself drawn to Chuan, the son of the farm’s manager, different from him in every way except for one.
Out in the fields, and on the streets into town, the charge between the boys intensifies. Inside the house, the other family members confront their own regrets, and begin to drift apart. Like the land around them, they are powerless to resist the global forces that threaten to render their lives obsolete.
At once sweeping and intimate, The South is a story of what happens when private and public lives collide. It is the first in a quartet of novels that form Tash Aw’s masterful portrait of a family navigating a period of great change – a reimagined epic for our times.
One Boat
Jonathan Buckley | 9781804271766 | Fitzcarraldo Editions | PB
On losing her father, Teresa returns to a small town on the Greek coast – the same place she visited when grieving her mother nine years ago. She immerses herself again in the life of the town, observing the inhabitants going about their business, a quiet backdrop for her reckoning with herself. An episode from her first visit resurfaces vividly – her encounter with John, a man struggling to come to terms with the violent death of his nephew. Soon Teresa encounters some of the people she met last time around: Petros, an eccentric mechanic, whose life story may or may not be part of John’s; the beautiful Niko, a diving instructor; and Xanthe, a waitress in one of the cafés on the leafy town square. They talk about their longings, regrets, the passing of time, their sense of who they are. Artfully constructed, absorbing and insightful, One Boat is a brilliant novel grappling with questions of identity, free will, guilt and responsibility.
Available in Store
The Land in Winter
Andrew Miller | 9781529354300 | Sceptre | PB
DECEMBER 1962, THE WEST COUNTRY.
Local doctor Eric Parry, mulling secrets, sets out on his rounds, while his pregnant wife sleeps on in the warmth of their cottage. Across the field, funny, troubled Rita Simmons is also asleep, her head full of images of a past life her husband prefers to ignore. He’s been up for hours, tending to the needs of the small dairy farm where he hoped to create a new version of himself, a project that’s already faltering.
But when the ordinary cold of an English December gives way to violent blizzards, the two couples find their lives beginning to unravel.
Where do you hide when you can’t leave home? And where, in a frozen world, can you run to?
Universality
Natasha Brown | 9780571389025 | Faber and Faber | TPB
On an abandoned Yorkshire farm, a group of hippie-anarchists have taken up residence to build a new society. When their leader is brutally bludgeoned with a solid gold bar, an ambitious young journalist sets out to uncover the truth behind the attack. The longread exposé she writes goes viral – but is there more to the story than meets the eye?
Universality unravels the messy aftermath of that exposé through the perspective of each of the mystery’s key players: a self-pitying banker, a columnist with secrets, a cult leader with dreams, and a fugitive with nothing left to lose.
The follow-up to Natasha Brown’s Assembly is a twisty, slippery story of media, class, power and truth. Cutting through the noise, it reveals British society today for what it is.
