The literary world turns its eyes to London tonight as the winner of the 2025 Booker Prize is announced, concluding a season that has celebrated some of the most intimate and globally attuned fiction in years.

Six novels are in contention. Ben Markovits’s The Rest of Our Lives traces a middle-aged man’s quiet reckoning with marriage and memory on a cross-country road trip. Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter compresses domestic tension into the icy claustrophobia of England’s 1963 “Big Freeze.”

In Flashlight, Susan Choi transforms a child’s near-fatal accident into a decades-long study of identity and migration, while David Szalay’s Flesh examines the fragility of European masculinity through austere, minimalist prose.

Kiran Desai’s long-awaited The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny revisits the migrant experience with an epic sweep across four continents, and Katie Kitamura’s Audition plays with alternate realities to probe parenthood, memory, and performance.

Academics reviewing the shortlist describe the 2025 field as “intimate yet ambitious,” balancing personal stories with broad social insight. The £50 000 award will cap a year when the Booker once again tested the boundaries of contemporary storytelling.