The Booker Prize is one of the most prestigious literary awards in the English-speaking world. Each year, a panel of writers, critics, and editors selects a shortlist of novels from the UK, Ireland, and the Commonwealth based on artistic merit, originality, and craft. These are the books that push the form forward — daring, challenging, and often unforgettable.
By Susan Choi
Flashlight by Susan Choi follows ten-year-old Louisa, whose father Serk vanishes during a nighttime walk along a Japanese beach, leaving her hypothermic and with almost no memory of what happened. In the years that follow, Louisa and her American mother, Anne, struggle to rebuild their lives while coping with the mystery at the family's center. As Louisa grows up, buried histories slowly surface—her father's complicated past in Korea and Japan, her mother's estranged first child, Tobias—revealing how unspoken secrets, loss, and half-remembered moments shape one family across decades.
By David Szalay
Flesh follows István, a shy teenager growing up with his mother in a bleak Hungarian housing estate, as he stumbles into adulthood over five decades. An early sexual encounter and its tragic fallout send him through juvenile detention, military service, and a string of rough jobs before he drifts to London. There, a chance act of heroism draws him into the orbit of the ultra-wealthy, where he becomes a chauffeur, bodyguard, and eventually a rich property developer. Szalay's novel traces István's uneasy rise and fall, exploring desire, class, and the stubborn pull of his past without offering easy redemption.
By Ben Markovits
In The Rest of Our Lives, 55-year-old law professor Tom Layward drives his youngest child, Miriam, to start college and then, instead of returning to his uneasy marriage, simply keeps heading west. As he crosses the United States, visiting old friends, past loves, and his grown son, Tom grapples with the long aftermath of his wife's long-ago affair, his stalled career, and a worrying health problem he can't quite name. The trip becomes a wry, often intimate midlife reckoning, as Tom tests what kind of husband, father, and man he still has time to be.
By Andrew Miller
Set in rural southwest England during the brutal winter of 1962–63, The Land in Winter follows two neighboring couples, doctor Eric and his educated but restless wife Irene, and struggling farmer Bill and his lively, out-of-place wife Rita. Both women are newly pregnant and isolated, their houses separated by a single field and a gulf of class and experience. As snow deepens and the 'Big Freeze' cuts the village off, small encounters and buried frustrations slowly reshape their tentative friendship and uneasy marriages. Under the pressure of cold, confinement, and wartime aftershocks, quiet lives tilt toward unforeseen change.
By Claire Adam
Love Forms follows Dawn, a successful London doctor who has never recovered from the secret she's carried since she was sixteen and pregnant in Trinidad. Sent away in shame to give birth in a convent and surrender her baby for adoption, she builds a new life—marriage, career, sons—yet remains haunted by the daughter she never knew. Now in her late fifties, newly divorced and feeling unmoored, Dawn begins retracing her past across Trinidad, Venezuela, and England, confronting family silences, shifting loyalties, and the many complicated shapes that love can take.
By Natasha Brown
Set on a Yorkshire farm during an illegal lockdown rave, Universality begins with a near-fatal attack carried out using a missing solid gold bar. Ambitious freelance journalist Hannah turns the incident into a viral investigative article that links a disgraced banker landlord, a radical anarchist commune, and a controversial media columnist. As the book shifts through multiple perspectives in the scandal's aftermath, it explores competing versions of the truth and the blurred lines between reporting and storytelling, asking how power, class, and the attention economy shape what we say, what's believed, and who gets to control the narrative.
By Jonathan Buckley
After her father's death, Teresa returns to a small coastal town in Greece, the place she first visited nine years earlier while mourning her mother. Haunted by both losses, she drifts between past and present, revisiting the hotel, cafés and shoreline that have become entwined with her grief. As she reconnects with locals she once knew—a charming diving instructor, a wary café owner, a troubled Englishman nursing old wounds—Teresa records her days and vivid dreams, searching for a story to write and a new sense of self. One Boat quietly explores memory, desire and the way places hold our sorrows.
By Maria Reva
Set in Ukraine on the eve of the 2022 invasion, Endling follows Yeva, a solitary biologist obsessed with saving endangered snails, who crosses paths with sisters Nastia and Sol, participants in a dubious 'romance tour' for foreign bachelors. The sisters are plotting a provocative stunt against the exploitative mail-order bride industry, and they enlist Yeva's van and reluctant help. As their kidnapping scheme collides with mounting political tension and personal histories, the novel blends dark comedy, social commentary, and looming catastrophe, exploring love, activism, and survival in a country on the brink.
By Benjamin Wood
Seascraper follows Thomas Flett, a shy young shrimp fisherman in a faded Northern English coastal town in the 1960s, who lives with his mother and dreams secretly of becoming a folk musician. His days are ruled by the tides and the hard, lonely work of 'shanking' shrimp on a fog-bound beach, until a charismatic American film director arrives and hires him to scout locations for a planned movie. Over the course of a single charged day between land and sea, Thomas is forced to confront his past, his class-bound future, and the risky possibility of a different life.
By Rachel Kushner
Set in rural France in 2013, Creation Lake follows Sadie Smith, a 34-year-old American spy-for-hire sent to infiltrate an anti-capitalist eco-commune accused of plotting acts of sabotage. Posing as a translator, Sadie embeds herself among the activists at a cooperative farm, where she is drawn into tense relationships and competing agendas. As she secretly reports on the group, she becomes increasingly captivated by Bruno Lacombe, a reclusive philosopher in a cave whose radical ideas and emails unsettle her sense of purpose. The novel blends espionage, politics, and philosophy as Sadie's mission and identity begin to blur.
By Samantha Harvey
Orbital follows six astronauts and cosmonauts from different countries as they spend a single day aboard a space station, circling Earth every 90 minutes. As they carry out experiments and routine maintenance, they witness dazzling views of the planet, including a rapidly intensifying typhoon and signs of environmental fragility below. Within the cramped, weightless station, their thoughts drift to families, aging bodies, lost parents, and unrealized ambitions, especially as a new lunar mission unfolds far away. Blending intimate interior lives with vast cosmic vistas, the novel quietly explores time, connection, and what it means to be human.
By Anne Michaels
Held by Anne Michaels is a lyrical, time‑spanning novel that follows a family and those orbiting them from a World War I battlefield into the near future. It begins with John, a wounded soldier in France whose thoughts drift to his beloved Helena and the fragile threads of chance that bound their lives together. As the narrative moves across decades and countries, artists, scientists, refugees, and lovers struggle with war's aftermath, memory, and the unseen presence of the dead. Through recurring encounters with love, loss, and unexpected grace, the book meditates on how human connection endures across generations.
By Charlotte Wood
Stone Yard Devotional follows an unnamed, middle-aged woman who abandons her city life, career, and marriage to retreat to a small convent in the Australian Monaro Plains. Seeking silence rather than faith, she adjusts to the slow, ritualized rhythms of the nuns' days while haunted by memories of her childhood and her mother's early death. As unsettling events disturb the abbey's fragile peace, she is forced to confront questions of guilt, forgiveness, grief, and moral responsibility in a time of ecological and personal crisis, testing whether withdrawal can ever offer true refuge.
By Colin Barrett
Set over one tense weekend in the Irish town of Ballina, Wild Houses follows Dev Hendrick, a reclusive giant still grieving his mother, whose quiet life is shattered when his drug-dealing cousins stash a kidnapped teenager, Doll English, in his basement. Doll has been taken as leverage in a feud with his wayward older brother. While Dev is dragged unwillingly into the spiraling revenge plot, Doll's sharp, determined girlfriend Nicky—already questioning her future in their small town—sets out to find him. As the hours pass, loyalties blur and ordinary people are pushed toward dangerous choices.
By Sarah Perry
Set in the Essex town of Aldleigh, Enlightenment follows Thomas Hart and Grace Macaulay, unlikely friends separated by three decades but bound by their Strict Baptist faith and restless curiosity. As the Hale–Bopp comet crosses the 1997 sky, both fall in love in ways that strain their fragile bond and challenge the limits of their sheltered community. In the aftermath, Thomas becomes fixated on the mystery of a long-vanished nineteenth-century woman astronomer, while Grace escapes to London. Spanning twenty years, the novel explores love, belief, science, and whether two wandering lives can ever realign.
The Booker Prize is one of the most prestigious literary awards in the English-speaking world. Each year, a panel of writers, critics, and editors selects a shortlist of novels from the UK, Ireland, and the Commonwealth based on artistic merit, originality, and craft. These are the books that push the form forward — daring, challenging, and often unforgettable.