Thank you for talking to us about this year’s Booker Prize shortlist. Could you tell us a little about the judging process—how many books you read, and what you were looking for when you were looking for the best novels of the year?

We read a hundred and fifty-three books in total. After hours of deliberations that included both delightful moments of agreement and some disputes about the books we had to consider, we’ve arrived at a great shortlist that we are all proud of, one I hope several people will read.

As I writer, I’m keenly aware of how transformative being nominated for a prize as prestigious as this can be, so I was looking for books that I thought were really deserving based how well they were written. I know the other judges took the task very seriously as well, hoping that a combination of our subjective tastes would result in a prize year that highlights wonderful books.

It was equally important for us on the judging panel to assess what the author had set out to achieve and evaluate the work within that context. Ultimately, I think we were all searching for truly excellent fiction, books so accomplished that we felt compelled to share them with the world. Books that would stand on their own even if read decades from now

Did you notice trends among this year’s submissions? Anything that surprised you, looking at the field of contemporary fiction as a whole?

I got the sense that many writers are engaged in the urgent task of making sense of a world that feels increasingly complex and unstable. Sometimes they approach this task through the prism of the past, drawing connections between history and the forces shaping our lives now. Their gaze may be direct, interrogating contemporary events head-on, or oblique, approaching their subjects through allusions or allegories. Contemporary fiction also seems particularly attuned to the rapid transformations brought by technology and government, and to how humanity navigates the confluence of these forces.

Let’s step through the shortlisted books in turn, starting with Susan Choi’s Flashlight. Why do the Booker Prize judges feel this to be one of the best novels of the year?

Flashlight opens with the mysterious disappearance of a young academic from a beach. Though his young daughter, Louisa, is found, she barely remembers all that has just happened. From there, the story traces the many lives of a man once known as Seok Kang. The son of Korean immigrants in Japan, he becomes Hiroshi to escape discrimination. Later on, as a student in the United States, he adopts the name Serk. It is in the U.S that he meets Louisa’s mother, Anne.

Serk’s chapters intertwine with those of other central figures: Anne, whose rebellious youth has given way to a life marked by illness and reflection; Tobias, her son, and Louisa, the daughter she shares with Serk. Around them orbit a cast of vivid secondary characters whose lives mirror and refract the novel’s central questions, from Serk’s relatives who left Japan for North Korea in search of dignity, to the friends and acquaintances whose lives intersect with Louisa and Anne’s lives through the years.

As you read, you’ll notice fragments that quietly return, fitting back into the story in unexpected but powerfully resonant ways. It is a sweeping and profound novel, rendered with exquisite attention to detail.

The book’s origins lie in a short story Choi published in 2020. But the novel came to span continents and decades. I thought it perhaps reflected an expansive creative process of the kind you once spoke of, when you said: “ideas, especially the ones that become novels, come to me before I am ready for them.” Would you talk a little about the winding roads fiction writers travel?

For me, writing often feels like a dance between doubt and those sudden flashes of clarity. A novel can start from the smallest things, a half-heard conversation, a song I can’t get out of my head, a stranger’s gesture that lingers longer than it should. Somehow, these pieces come together to form a constellation that captures my imagination, sometimes to the point of obsession. It always takes time and patience; you know there’s something there, but it only starts to reveal itself through the act of writing.

I often think of that E.L. Doctorow line: “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” Both of my novels began like that, what I thought were short stories that just kept growing until they showed me what they really wanted to be. With regards to Flashlight I read the short story after reading the novel and think both inhabit their respective forms so brilliantly. It is a joy to have both iterations in the world.

Next on the list we have Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. Would you introduce it to our readers?

On the surface, this is the love story of Sonia, a writer, and Sunny, a journalist, both of whom are to varying degrees torn between India and America. While that thread is fascinating in itself, this is a multilayered novel that encompasses so much else. It unfolds across continents and generations, exploring not just Sonia and Sunny’s entwined lives but also the delicate, liminal spaces between two worlds.

Themes of migration, identity, loneliness and class ripple through the novel, as do the subtle fissures between East and West. All of this rendered with a spellbinding intensity that lingers with the reader long after the final page.

I liked what the New York Times had to say about it: “One of the many miracles of Desai’s writing is the attention she gives to secondary and even minor characters — far too many to detail here, and not all animate.” Could you tell us more?

We are also introduced to a cast of secondary characters so vividly drawn they could almost be protagonists in their own right, each bringing depth, perspective, and resonance to the central story. Through its many voices, the novel navigates the tension between social realism and magical realism in Indian fiction, weaving these traditions into a tapestry that is at once inventive, immersive, and hauntingly alive. And yes, without giving away the plot to those who might not have read the novel, not all the characters are human and at least one is inanimate.

Let’s turn our attention to Katie Kitamura’s Audition. It’s a novel that unfolds in two parts. Can you tell us more?

Intimacies opens with an unnamed actress in New York meeting a young man in a restaurant. This eerie encounter with Xavier, who insists she is his mother, sets the tone for the novel’s central tensions. The book unfolds in two mirrored halves, each presenting a distinct version of events that challenge the reader’s perception of truth and memory. Through this dual narrative, the novel carefully examines questions of identity, perception, and the moments that can ripple outward to reshape the understanding of a life. Each half offers its own perspective, inviting the reader to navigate the shifting ground between reality and interpretation.

Kitamura has said of the book that it “has been designed to be read in several ways… almost as a bit of a Rorschach blot.” Did you find it destabilising to read?

To some extent, it is one of those mesmerising books that insists on being read on its own terms. It is a book in which reality shifts in both unsettling and arresting ways. It is such a thoughtful exploration of the porous boundaries between acting and being.

Next we have recent Five Books interviewee Ben Markovits‘s The Rest of Our Lives. It’s a kind of road trip novel—would you say more?

It is the story of Tom Lawyard, a middle-aged law professor with health problems he initially attributes to long Covid. Years ago, his wife Amy had an affair that hurt him so deeply he quietly resolved to leave her eventually.

After he drops off their youngest child in college, Tom decides to keep driving west instead of returning home to Amy. This road trip across America becomes a journey through his life as he meets up with old friends, plays basketball, visits his son and reflect on his marriage and career.

I loved how the novel draws us deep into the mind of a middle-aged man navigating a world that feels increasingly unwelcoming. There’s a quiet brilliance to the prose, it is wry, tender, and precise. Small, seemingly ordinary details slowly gather weight, accumulating into moments that are unexpectedly moving and profound.

Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter is next on the shortlist. Earlier this year it won the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction. Would you talk us through it?

Set in December 1962 in the rural West Country of England, The Land in Winter follows the quiet unravelling of two neighbouring young couples during ‘the Big Freeze.’ Eric Parry, a country doctor, is married to Irene, who has left London for the countryside and already feels out of place. Though she is now pregnant, Eric’s attention is often elsewhere, preoccupied with matters beyond his growing family. Their neighbours, Bill Simmons and his wife Rita, live on a dairy farm they can barely keep afloat. Rita, once a club dancer in Bristol, is also adapting to farm life while expecting a child.

Central to the story is a tense Boxing Day party hosted by the Parrys, attended by both couples and other acquaintances, including Eric’s lover and her husband. This masterfully described gathering becomes a focal point where social masks slip and hidden fractures surface. As the relentless winter continues, the couples’ isolation grows, and they forced to confront not only their relationships and surroundings but also the lingering shadows of war and past trauma.

It is such an elegantly written novel, with sentences so finely calibrated that Miller’s descriptions are infused with psychological weight. The effect is so successful that for instance, the descriptions of the weather transform a frozen landscape into a mirror of his characters’ inner lives.

Quite, quite different. And, more generally, the shortlist feels very diverse, stylistically. Was this a conscious decision?

No, I don’t think we thought about it directly. But we did observe that after the decisions had been finalised. We wanted to present what we collectively consider to be the most excellent fiction we’d read of the 153. These six wonderful books rose to the top after hours of deliberation.

And I think that brings us, finally, to David Szalay’s Flesh. In it, we follow a young Hungarian man, István, through his life. What about this book caught the judges’ attention?

At fifteen, István lives with his mother in an apartment block in Hungary. Riddled with adolescent uncertainty about his place in the world, he is lured into an unsettling, and ultimately devastating relationship with an older, married woman.

As the novel progresses, we follow István’s transformation from boyhood into uneasy manhood in a rapidly globalizing world. We see him conscripted into the army, later serving in Iraq, and eventually making his way to the glittering universe of London’s wealthy elite. Each phase of his life exposes him to new hierarchies and moral ambiguities. Through it all a hunger for connection, for recognition, for something resembling meaning, continues to pulse beneath the surface of István’s life.

Flesh explores the ways power, money, and desire intertwine, and how loneliness can endure even amid apparent success. The writing is precise and unsentimental, yet it is brutally affecting and intimate. It can be read as study of class, aspiration, and the quiet compromises that shape people. One of the things that I find remarkable is its subtle exploration of how the marks left by youth can echo through an entire life.

What would you say the judging process has taught you—and do you think it will alter the way you will approach your own writing?

It has been a wonderfully immersive experience. I consider myself an avid reader, but I’ve definitely never read 153 books that were published in the same 12-month window. So, in one sense, judging the Booker prize feels like a masterclass in contemporary fiction. It’s impossible to tell for sure how it will impact my own writing. I do feel, however, that I am now even more interested in how fiction can remain relevant over time. I hope what I write from here on reflects that possibility.

Interview by Cal Flyn, Deputy Editor

November 5, 2025

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