Bookerthon – 2025

For our 25th Bookerthon, we hunkered down in Arrowtown, Central Otago, where fresh snow made for great photos against the blue skies and Spring blooms. The setting, as it turned out, mirrored the prose of this year’s Booker shortlist: crisp, clear and alive.

They were alone together, and no one had told her how long it would last. [Flashlight]

What we discovered in our reading was a shortlist of interiority, human fragility, and the small moments that make a life. There were no invented worlds or speculative dystopias here, nor attempts to retell or deconstruct history. Instead, these books turned inward, examining existence and connection.

Historical and political moments do feature but rather than take over the plot they create mood and explanation. History serves as a kind of echo chamber, amplifying the moral, emotional, and spiritual dilemmas of living a human life under pressure.

Every book features a character who is lonely or disconnected, an individual whose sense of place diminishes despite the world growing ever more connected. The characters are alienated yet crave intimacy, and are burdened by expectations. The settings differ, from Cold War Britain to contemporary America to the backstreets of Delhi, but the emotional weather is the same: everyone is searching for meaning within their own solitude.

If you are lonely, you feel ashamed, and the only relief to your shame is being alone, which is what makes you lonely in the first place. [The Loneliness of Sonia & Sunny]

Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia & Sunny was nineteen years in the making and follows two Indian immigrants separated by continents yet joined by a shared sense of loss and longing. Their loneliness becomes a metaphor for the way one can be surrounded by others and still feel unseen.

Susan Choi’s Flashlight captures loneliness both literally and emotionally. Her characters are haunted by their pasts and by the aftershocks of war that ripple through generations. The novel’s fractured structure reflects their disorientation with raw memories and years vanishing between chapters.

Katie Kitamura’s Audition takes isolation into another register by questioning the idea of performance and how we want to be seen. It’s a book that kind of watches you back, reminding you of your own solitude and place.

Home, it turned out, had been the perfect preparation for not being at home. [The Land In Winter]

Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter is probably the most traditional on the list, but also the most complete. Set during Britain’s great freeze of 1962, it traps two couples within a landscape of ice and introspection. The snow isolates them physically, but class, illness, money and silence isolate them emotionally.

Ben Markovits’ The Rest of Our Lives is a midlife road novel with a lonely man obsessed with self-invention at its centre. Tom replays old failures and tests out new versions of himself. He’s a man haunted by the question of what a life comes to when the easy milestones have been met. 

David Szalay’s Flesh follows István, a Hungarian man who is always moving but stationary at the same time. He moves through jobs, countries, and relationships without really showing any emotion. 

Something uncoiled in my stomach, slow and languorous, and I decided it would be better if I left. [Audition]

Each book is precisely controlled and shaped. Whether 192 or 670 pages long there are no wasted words and a real sense of the author’s control. The books have mostly linear narratives, strong dialogue and intelligent observations. Even their endings feel akin. None rely on revelation. There are no late-stage twists or transformations. Instead, they close quietly, with characters who seem to understand that life continues, albeit it in an altered state.

Is the idea of healing to get you back to the way you used to be or to turn you into something new? [The Rest Of Our Lives]

Szalay’s title introduces another shared theme: flesh. These books are full of bodies damaged, desired, failing and enduring. Their characters are abused, ill, pregnant, grieving, performing. They are trying to inhabit their own flesh in a world that often uses it against them. The body becomes both the battlefield and the evidence of survival, another way to explore what it means to exist meaningfully amid the noise.

For all their seriousness, these novels aren’t bleak. Their introspection offers the consoling thought that being lonely, uncertain or adrift is to be human, and that even in solitude, we are seen.

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SUZY:
An absolutely fantastic shortlist, with each novel showcasing an author at the top of their game. Many of the books had a lovely meandering quality to them, luring me in to a gentle state only to then leave me thrown when everything was turned on its head. I was able to completely lose myself in each and every one of them and did not feel like I was reading a book, but rather gaining an insight into the lives, loves and losses of many different people. The Loneliness of Sonia & Sunny was my absolute highlight and I am crossing my fingers for the brilliant Kiran Desai. 

After a while he does make one friend, another solitary individual. [Flesh]

RACHEL:
While I had varying responses to the individual titles I liked the six as a collection. It feels like a purposeful selection by the judges, wanting to set to history the tone of literature in 2025. This introspective focus makes for meaningful reading, like really getting to the heart of life and living. As such all these characters are memorable (for better or worse) and I’m sure they will stay with me for a long time.

I read a few of the longlisted books too and to be honest was disappointed some of them did not progress further. Seascraper by Benjamin Wood and Love Forms by Claire Adam were fantastic and would have fit into the shortlist theme of isolation and place. Endling by Maria Reva also studies the meaning of the individual but in an absurdist text. Its surrealism drives home the need for a sense of belonging and in my opinion should have been shortlisted and should have won. Without it to choose from I’ll put my bets on Audition by Katie Kitamura. It’s an intelligent work that lets the reader get involved in the performance of just being and I appreciated the multi-meaning narrative.