Fiction
The 2025 Booker Prize Shortlist
I made it a goal to work my way through the Booker Prize Shortlist for 2025.
To date, I’ve finished Audition by Katie Kitamura, Flashlight by Susan Choi, The Rest of Our Lives by Benjamin Markovits and Flesh by David Szalay. With The Loneliness of Sunny and Sonia by Kiran Desai and The Land of Winter by Andrew Miller to go, I’m looking forward to completing this little challenge between my book club reads, new release reads and reading for pleasure reads.
Certainly, reading through lists of books like this provides an opportunity to read something that I otherwise wouldn’t have chosen for myself. I typically alternate between a bunch of other genres including contemporary fiction, Australian fiction, fantasy, romance and crime based on how I’m feeling or who’s recommended something to me.
The Booker is, at times, a little controversial in their shortlist selections. And to be honest, the general chat around the shortlist for this year was one of underwhelm. Overwhelming, I personally felt many of the titles are arthouse for the sake of it, and not necessarily because it adds a lot to the overall narrative.
Anyway, without further ado, here’s a brief review of what I’ve read so far – bearing in mind this is very subjective, I’m no literary professor and what I enjoy you may not and vice versa. As a bookseller I think you should definitely buy them and decide for yourself (ha!).
I’ve read a few reviews of this, and I can’t help but ask myself, did we read the same novel?
I greatly disliked this book, because I felt it to be wholly unrealistic (this coming from someone who recently read a book about a talking plant). And yet. I won’t spoil the ending, but the premise is that a young man walks into the life of a woman in her 40’s, a renowned actress. He’s young enough to be her son and act one of the book is the set up as we pick apart what they might be to each other. Act two of book brings it all together, after a brief period of feeling like I might have had a stroke and missed 20% of the story. Turns out I had not and all was revealed in a dramatic (well, she is an actress) if odd sort of way.
I’ve read a few reviews of this, and I can’t help but ask myself, did we read the same novel?
My favourite book of the shortlist so far. Set in post WWII Japan and the USA, a husband and father goes missing on a trip to Japan with his family. He’s crotchety, defensive and secretive – don’t worry, across 464 pages the narrative unfurls and we definitively find out why. It’s fascinating, a look into the way culture plays into identity, the fallout on a family when a member goes missing and what impacts this has across their lives. I learned quite a bit about a topic I didn’t possess a lot of knowledge on and found time to reflect on family, loss and the cohesive unit.
Compared to Kitamura’s spartan 200 pages, Flashlight is over twice as long (I suspect the word count to be far more than double). Where Audition takes a microscope on one tiny facet of a life, Flashlight followed two lifetimes spanning the globe, cultures and of course, time.
The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovitz
This short novel follows the journey of a middle-aged man dropping his daughter at college and deciding to just keep driving. I’m sure many of us have thought about doing this before, heading off on an adventure with no end to escape the banalities of every day life, undertake a little soul searching and hopefully find our way back home again, enriched, fulfilled and ready to take on the next part of life. The concept was great, the execution was interesting, and the health condition the main character is downplaying throughout the novel adds an element of the ridiculous to some of his interactions.
The winner! Flesh by David Szalay is a rags to riches story, it feels like life just seems to happen to Istvan. There’s a lot of “ok”, “sure” and “yes” that takes place as Istvan drifts through life from one chaotic circumstance to the next. He seems to lack any sort of ambition and the few times he does attempt to chase a goal it backfires in the worst kind of way.
Whilst I don’t hold the same disdain for this as I do Audition, I also won’t be reading it again. It was an okay novel, it touched on some interesting topics like wealth accumulation and the ethics attached to its acquisition and distribution, there was a lot of sleeping with married women and at the end of the day the protagonist wasn’t really super likeable. I wasn’t invested in his success or failure either way.
I’ve loved this little challenge, trying new things and remembering why I love what I do love. Don’t get me wrong, I adore strange and uncomfortable books, I think I ultimately need to connect with the main character to really invest in the story and I struggled to do that which a most of these books.
These books remind me of a complex red wine (bear with me here). Some wines are quaffers, you can drink them any day of the week with almost any food and enjoy them without having to think too much. Others need to breathe and be paired with the right meal and company, after prolonged cellaring. They are more complex and not for the everyday palate, they are an acquired taste. Or maybe they’ll grow on me over time with repeated exposure and the chance to think more deeply about their messaging, content and context.
In the meantime, I’m off to go and finish Mother Mary Comes to Me. You can read Tessa’s review of this here.
What did you think of the Booker this year? Did we like topics of underage sex, fake families and middle-age crises? Am I being too critical? Am I yet to read the best two novels – I hope so!