Everything We Know About The Booker Prize Longlist and Kiran Desai's Booker Prize Return

An escapade through a farm in southern Malaysia, a Hungarian housing estate, and a small coastal town in Greece are journeys not to be missed, especially if you're curious about fascinating stories of human experience.

You'll cross paths with a homesick Indian in snowy Vermont, a Kosovar torture survivor in New York, a shrimp fisherman in northern England, Koreans navigating life in postcolonial Japan, a mother searching for her child given up for adoption and more.

This year’s Booker Prize longlist invites readers on an equally compelling global itinerary. The nominated titles transport us to the very locations mentioned above, including that farm in Malaysia (The South by Tash Aw), a Hungarian housing estate (Flesh by David Szalay), and a coastal Greek setting (Love Forms by Claire Adam).

Yuki Sugiura for Booker Prize Foundation

Joining them are stories exploring identity and belonging in diverse contexts—from Koreans in Japan to Venezuelan families and endangering snails in a mobile lab in Ukraine (Endling by Maria Reva).

Amongst the 13 nominations, one notable nominee Kiran Desai, has got everyone excited as her book The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a long-awaited return from the Booker-winning novel The Inheritance of Loss.

Other authors include Susan Choi (Flashlight), Katie Kitamura (Audition), Natasha Brown (Universality), Jonathan Buckley (One Boat), Ben Markovits (The Rest of Our Lives), and Andrew Miller (The Land in Winter). Collectively, the 13 longlisted books feature writers from nine nationalities and consistently explore themes of identity, migration, history, and quiet internal drama.

But unlike the many Booker Prize nominations in the past, The Booker Prize that has been long known for considering nominations for the longlist from Ireland and the UK is finally moving outside the English islands. The prestigious literary awards this year is the most globally diverse longlist in a decade, yes in a decade!

And that's isn't all that's newly different about the Booker. This year the judges have also decided on announcing the six shortlisted names from the 13 nominations at a public event - first of a kind- on 23 September 2025 at Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall in London.

The Longest Book

Nineteen years after her Booker Prize win for The Inheritance of Loss, Indian novelist Kiran Desai is back in the race with her third novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, longlisted among 13 titles for the 2025 Booker Prize.

Desai’s return marks one of the most eagerly anticipated literary comebacks of the decade. The new novel is her first since the Booker‑winning The Inheritance of Loss in 2006, a debut that established her as a perceptive chronicler of postcolonial identity and family tensions.

The Booker Prize

Now aged 53, she has delivered a sprawling, deeply textured epic after almost two decades of work, an ambitious novel that sprawls to 667 pages, making it the longest entry on this year’s longlist.

Published by Hamish Hamilton and set for release in September, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny tracks the intertwined lives of two young Indians navigating complex terrains of country, class, race, memory, language, and generational ties—themes of identity and belonging anchor its narrative scope.

Sonia and Sunny inhabit worlds shaped both by India and the United States, drawing on cross‑continental perspectives to explore how individuals carry and sometimes shed their cultural legacies.

Kiran Desai The Booker Prize

Judges lauded the novel’s scale: Roddy Doyle, chair of the panel, described the entries as “alive with great characters and narrative surprises,” noting a rich commitment to identity at the heart of every book selected.

Desai’s longlisting also underscores a multi‑generational tradition: her mother, Anita Desai, has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times, though she never won. So, should Kiran win again, she would join an elite group of authors to hold two Booker titles in the prize’s nearly six-decades history, becoming only the fifth double winner ever.

The Booker Prize Longlist winner will be announced on Monday, 10 November 2025 at a ceremony at Old Billingsgate in London. The announcement will be livestreamed on the Booker Prizes’ channels. The winner receives £50,000.