The finalists for this year’s Booker Prize have been revealed, after judges whittled down the 13-strong longlist to six that will compete for the prestigious literary award.
The shortlist includes Indian-born author Kiran Desai, 19 years after she won the prize, as well as past nominees Andrew Miller and David Szalay.
A trio of US writers – Susan Choi, Katie Kitamura and Ben Markovits – will also be up for the prize when the winner is announced in November.
Actress Sarah Jessica Parker has said she and the other judges of this year’s prize had “real agony” deciding which novels to include on the shortlist, but said taking part in the process has been a “privilege”.
The 6 shortlisted books;
Susan Choi – Flashlight
Choi’s sixth novel starts with a 10-year-old girl taking a walk on a beach with her father, then waking up alone on the shore, with her dad presumed drowned. As she tries to piece together what happened, the story jumps across generations and locations, from Japan to America and North Korea.
The judges said it’s “a family drama and geopolitical thriller about a fascinating episode from history”, adding: “This is one of those books that completely dominates your thoughts.”
Kiran Desai – The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
Desai won the Booker for The Inheritance of Loss in 2006, and is back with its long-awaited follow-up. Its 650 pages deliver an epic tale about love, ambition, family and belonging after two Indian writers who have settled in the US reconnect on an overnight train.
The judges called it “an intimate and expansive epic about two people finding a pathway to love and each other”, adding: “Rich in meditations about class, race and nationhood, this book has it all.”
Katie Kitamura – Audition
The fifth novel by Kitamura is narrated by an actress who meets a man claiming to be her son, with overlapping narratives that blur the lines of the characters we play and reality. Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company are making a film version starring Lucy Liu.
The judges said it’s “a brilliantly tense, taut novel that sees an actress’s life turned inside out and leaves a lot open to interpretation”, adding: “What’s real? Audition makes existential detectives of us all.”
Ben Markovits – The Rest of Our Lives
A middle-aged man leaves his home and marriage and goes on a road trip after dropping off his daughter at university. It’s the 12th novel by the UK-based American writer, who was once a professional basketball player in Germany.
The judges said: “A road trip chronicle, a book about sickness, a basketball novel, a family saga, and a story about how we say goodbye, with a ridiculously relatable narrator.”
Andrew Miller – The Land in Winter
Miller, from Bristol, was last nominated for Oxygen in 2001, and is shortlisted again for this novel about two couples, with two pregnant women, whose lives unravel during a ferocious winter storm in the West Country in 1962.
The judges said: “A novel about how to live, and about the tensions within marriages, set against the most dramatic winter in living memory. It’s a joy to read, a nerve-shredding pleasure.”
David Szalay – Flesh
The British-Hungarian writer’s sixth novel follows the twists and turns as a shy 15-year-old boy from a Hungarian housing estate becomes a driver and security guard for London’s ultra-rich. Szalay was previously nominated for All That Man Is in 2016.
Irish novelist Roddy Doyle is heading up the jury as the chair of judges, with the panel that also includes Booker Prize-longlisted authors Ayobami Adebayo and Kiley Reid, alongside author and literary critic Chris Power.
Doyle said he favours a traffic-light system, whereby each jury member assigns a green, amber or red tag to each book as they read to signal their level of enthusiasm to the rest of the panel. Necessary for harmonious and swift communication, perhaps, when each panellist had to start with a pile of 153 submissions.
Penguin Random House dominated the 2024 shortlist, with four out of six of the novels from the publishing giant’s imprints (Flashlight, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, Audition, and Flesh) .
Independent publisher Faber has one on the shortlist — The Rest of Our Lives — but has a strong track record with seven previous Booker Prize winners on its books. Hodder & Stoughton imprint Sceptre also has a horse in the race with The Land in Winter, but has thus far only published six Booker-shortlisted novels.
Arguably the most anticipated novel on the shortlist is The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny – Kiran Desai’s first novel in 20 years. It is a story of love between two modern young Indians spanning years as their fates intersect and diverge across continents. It grapples with the ideas of tradition and modernity, India and the US, love and the complicated bonds that link generations together.
Should she win this year, Desai would become the fifth double winner in the prize’s 56-year existence, joining Margaret Atwood, Peter Carey, J.M. Coetzee and Hilary Mantel. It would also mean that India would secure an unprecedented clean sweep of 2025’s Booker Prizes, after author Banu Mushtaq and translator Deepa Bhasthi won the International Booker Prize for their short-story collection Heart Lamp earlier this year.
Although there are no debut authors on the shortlist, three novels are by first-time nominees – all American authors who only became eligible a decade ago.
The winner will be announced at a ceremony in London on 10 November.
