Inside the 2025 Booker Prize Winners List and the Stories That Shaped Them

This year’s Booker Prize went to Flesh — a book so taut and unadorned it feels like a stripped nerve. Hungarian-British writer David Szalay, known for his cool restraint and quiet observation of modern masculinity, has won the 2025 Booker Prize for his sixth novel, a spare, unsettling portrait of a man named István whose life unfolds from a bleak Hungarian housing block to the opulent drawing rooms of London’s elite.

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Szalay’s win feels both inevitable and surprising. Flesh is not a crowd-pleaser; it’s the kind of book that burns slowly and leaves a mark long after. Written in prose that’s been described as “all bone, no fat,” it captures the raw physicality of existence — desire, shame, class, and the heavy silence of men taught never to cry. Booker chair Roddy Doyle called it “a dark book, but a joy to read,” and the panel — which included actor Sarah Jessica Parker and writers Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, Chris Power, and Kiley Reid — reached the decision unanimously allegedly.

For Szalay, who was shortlisted once before in 2016 for All That Man Is, this win closes a long, unflashy arc of persistence. “It was conceived in the shadow of failure,” he wrote recently, describing how Flesh emerged after he abandoned another manuscript mid-pandemic. The book’s starkness mirrors that moment — the exhaustion, the body as the last reliable truth. It’s not glamorous, but it’s real.

The Year’s Strongest Shortlist in a While

If Flesh was the clear winner, it wasn’t a weak field. The 2025 shortlist may be one of the most interesting in years — a line-up that wrestled with identity, intimacy, and the slow ache of dislocation.

Bookmakers had pegged Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter as the frontrunner. Set in 1960s England, it explores two marriages cracking under class anxieties and post-war ennui — the kind of precise, elegant English novel that usually goes home with the prize. Then came The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, Kiran Desai’s first book in almost two decades, a sprawling 700-page exploration of two young Indians navigating the American dream and its quiet betrayals.

Desai’s reappearance alone made headlines. When she won the Booker in 2006 for The Inheritance of Loss, she was 35 — the youngest woman ever to win at the time. Then she disappeared, famously resistant to the churn of literary output. Sonia and Sunny reads like the work of someone who’s lived with her own silences — big, ambitious, and unhurried. It didn’t win, but its nomination signals a long-awaited return to form from one of India’s most thoughtful novelists.

Also on the shortlist: Susan Choi’s Flashlight, a sprawling family saga marked by formal daring; Katie Kitamura’s Audition, a cool, psychological study of identity and performance; and Ben Markovits’s The Rest of Our Lives, a midlife road novel that turns restlessness into philosophy.

The Pattern Beneath the Noise

What’s striking about this year’s list is its inwardness. Gone are the historical epics or political polemics that often dominate the Booker conversation. These books, especially Flesh and Audition, are intimate, skeletal, preoccupied with selfhood, silence, and the strange business of being alive. They’re about men and women trying to locate themselves in shifting worlds, about how class, migration, and identity shape even the smallest decisions.

In that sense, Szalay’s win isn’t just literary validation — it’s cultural reflection. Masculinity, once performed through excess, is now being written in whispers.