The Booker Prize 2025: Predictions, Preferences and Possibilities

It’s that time of year again… I haven’t had much success with my Booker Prize predictions in the last couple of years, but it’s still fun to consider which books might appear on the longlist, due to be announced this Tuesday. Eligible novels must have been published in the UK between 1st October 2024 and 30th September 2025.

I would of course like to see Ripeness by Sarah Moss on the longlist alongside Nesting by Roisin O’Donnell which is my stand-out debut novel of the year so far. Confessions by Catherine Airey could also be in with a chance.

Twist by Colum McCann examines the digital age through the eyes of someone who repairs undersea data cables. McCann has been longlisted twice for the Booker Prize before in 2013 and 2020. Among other previously longlisted authors, Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie seems likely to be one of the big names in contention while The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami could follow her 2015 longlisting for The Moor’s Account and is a piece of speculative fiction set in a world where even dreams are under surveillance. Theft by Abdulrazak Gurnah would be the third longlisting for the Nobel Prize-winning author, and is a coming-of-age story set in Tanzania at the turn of the 21st century.

Eligible novels by previous Booker Prize winners could include The Loneliness of Sunny and Sonia by Kiran Desai, a 700-page epic set in India and the United States. I am keen to read What We Can Know by Ian McEwan which the author has described as a work of science fiction “without the science” set in 2119 when the UK is partially submerged underwater. Both are due to be published in the UK in September.

Along similar themes on the other side of the globe, Juice by Tim Winton is set in a future Australia devastated by climate change. The winner of this year’s Stella Prize Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser is about a Sri-Lankan born woman living in Melbourne and writing a thesis about Virginia Woolf. It sounds unconventional, as does Helm by Sarah Hall about a mythic figure in the form of wind and its impact on various people over the centuries. Another possible contender is The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong about a 19-year-old man and elderly woman in a small town in Connecticut.

Which books would you like to see on the longlist?