A Booker shortlist for grown-ups?

The Booker Prize has been criticised in recent years for prioritising youth and novelty over maturity, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Times. That charge cannot be levelled against the 2025 judging panel, chaired by Roddy Doyle: their shortlist, announced last week, comprises “six books by seasoned novelists between the ages of 46 and 64”. Only one, Kiran Desai – nominated for her third novel, “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny”, a “vast love story” set in India and America – has written fewer than six books. It’s also a shortlist that “celebrates good old-fashioned literary fiction”. The judges seem to have deliberately avoided novels relying on “gimmicky conceit or stylistic flashiness”.

Radically different approaches

That’s not quite true, said Anthony Cummins in The Observer. While there are several “inarguably well-made” novels on the shortlist – notably Andrew Miller’s “The Land in Winter”, about two newlywed couples in the West Country during the big freeze of 1962, and Benjamin Markovits’ “The Rest of Our Lives”, about a “law lecturer who makes good on a long-held vow to walk out on his wife as payback for infidelity” – there are others that are more experimental. David Szalay’s “Flesh”, comprising nine episodes in the “life of a Hungarian ex-convict who settles in the UK”, is an experiment in a kind of “anti-style”: much of the dialogue consists of the protagonist saying “OK”.

Katie Kitamura’s “Audition” is narrated by a New York actor who inhabits two “subtly yet pivotally opposed realities”. “I hated it, and yet it has remained on my mind all year” – which might be a “sign of a novel built to last the judging process”. Rounding out the shortlist is Susan Choi’s “Flashlight”, a multigenerational saga set in North Korea, America and Japan, which “turns on the legacy of a father’s disappearance”. It’s undeniably a “powerful story”, but it struggles under the weight of its own ambition.

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‘Consistently brilliant’

Announcing the shortlist, Doyle complained about the overall quality of the 153 novels submitted: often, he said, the panel had wondered “why we had been asked to read” them. But the judges have done “extremely well”, said Lucy Thynne in The Daily Telegraph. This is “one of the most consistently brilliant” shortlists in years.

As for who will win, Desai (who won in 2006 for her last novel, “The Inheritance of Loss”) “might be most people’s tip”. Yet for my money, Miller’s “The Land in Winter” – a subtle, grown-up tale about a “1960s that isn’t yet swinging” – is “stronger”, and should be picked by the judges next month.