Chris Power Posts

The Booker Prize 2025 longlist

29 07 , 2025 No Comments

The full Booker Prize 2025 longlist, including author nationality, is:

– Love Forms (Faber) by Claire Adam (Trinidadian)

– The South (4th Estate) by Tash Aw (Malaysian)

– Universality (Faber) by Natasha Brown (British)

– One Boat (Fitzcarraldo Editions) by Jonathan Buckley (British)

– Flashlight (Jonathan Cape) by Susan Choi (American)

– The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (Hamish Hamilton) by Kiran Desai (Indian)

– Audition (Fern Press) by Katie Kitamura (American)

– The Rest of Our Lives (Faber) by Ben Markovits (American)

– The Land in Winter (Sceptre) by Andrew Miller (British)

– Endling (Virago) by Maria Reva (Canadian-Ukrainian)

– Flesh (Jonathan Cape) by David Szalay (Hungarian-British)

– Seascraper (Viking) by Benjamin Wood (British)

– Misinterpretation (Daunt Books Originals) by Ledia Xhoga (Albanian-American)

Discover the full list: https://thebookerprizes.com/bp2025

The longlist has been selected by the 2025 judging panel, chaired by critically acclaimed writer and 1993 Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle. 

Doyle, who is the first Booker Prize winner to chair the panel, is joined by Booker Prize-longlisted novelist Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀; award-winning actor, producer and publisher Sarah Jessica Parker; writer, broadcaster and literary critic Chris Power; and New York Times bestselling and Booker Prize-longlisted author Kiley Reid. 

This year’s selection, which was chosen from 153 submissions, celebrates the best works of long-form fiction by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between 1 October 2024 and 30 September 2025.

For the first time, the shortlist of six books will be announced at a public event, to be held at Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall in London on Tuesday, 23 September 2025. The six shortlisted authors will each receive £2,500 and a specially bound edition of their book. The announcement of the winning book  will take place 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.

The ‘Booker Dozen’ features five British authors, while also encapsulating a vast range of global experiences. The 13 novels transport readers to a farm in southern Malaysia, a Hungarian housing estate and a small coastal town in Greece. They shine a light on the lives of Koreans in postcolonial Japan, a homesick Indian in snowy Vermont, a Kosovar torture survivor living in New York, a shrimp fisherman in the north of England, a mother’s search for a child given up for adoption in Venezuela and even endangered snails in contemporary Ukraine. They reimagine the great American road trip as a slow-burning mid-life crisis and take us into the heart of the UK’s coldest winter. 

The judges’ selection features: 

  • Authors representing nine nationalities across four continents, with UK authors securing the highest number of nominations  
  • Kiran Desai, who is nominated 19 years after her previous book won the Booker Prize 
  • Tash Aw, longlisted for a third time, who could become the first Malaysian winner 
  • Past shortlistees Andrew Miller and David Szalay  
  • Two debut novelists among nine authors who appear on the Booker Prize longlist for the first time 
  • The first novel from an opera librettist and the 12th from a former professional basketball player 
  • A book that first garnered acclaim as a short story, and one that is the first in a proposed quartet 
  • Three titles from independent publisher Faber and a first Booker longlisting for Fitzcarraldo Editions, to add to its 16 International Booker Prize nominations  
  • Novels that are ‘alive with great characters and narrative surprises’ which ‘examine the past and poke at our shaky present’, according to Roddy Doyle, Chair of the 2025 judges  

This is a fabulous longlist with so much to discover. I am truly delighted at the coincidence that last week I had interviewed Andrew Miller on his fabulous book The Land in Winter for TOI Bookmark.

29 July 2025

Chris Power’s “A Lonely Man”

01 03 , 2021 No Comments

Chris Power’s debut novel, A Lonely Man ( Faber and Faber) gets a little tough to read in the middle due to the complexity of keeping pace with the Russian drama but as a literary construct trying to make sense of this very bizarre new world is fascinating. The clever literary device of distancing oneself from the actual action while naming very real names who have been at loggerheads with the Putin administration is very well done. It is an artifice that enables the narrator/ghostwriter to continually distance himself from the ugly world of Russian mafia and more. Yet, the unsettling ending to the novel leaves the reader gasping with the realisation that there is actually a very, very thin dividing line between reality and fiction.

Seriously, what is there not like about this debut novel. It has all the masala of a staid, boring, writer, a family man, who is pulled into telling the life story of another man, a ghostwriter. Roles are reversed and the original writer, Robert, who is facing writer’s block, suddenly recovers his writing abilities when trying to retell Patrick’s story. One that is unclear whether it is true or not but it is certainly fascinating. So while it has been established through the course of the novel that Robert himself can be prone to exaggeration while ghostwriting biographies that turned into bestsellers, it becomes increasingly hard to prove the truth of his current story. Robert claims to have been hired to ghostwrite the story of a Russian mafiosi, except that the man is discovered dead in a suspected suicide. Ever since then Robert has been on the run fearing for his life. The entire action of the plot takes place in Berlin and Sweden. Also, if one is familiar with the Russian exiles and more, as has trickled into many newspapers and documentaries, it makes this book much easier to read. But no harm done if you are unfamiliar with the names. It is just that then the reader will spend some excruciatingly distracting moments googling for the names.

This elegantly-told thriller, very gently turns a humdrum middle class reality into a sinister, dark world, and needs to be optioned for film pretty soon. Till then, read it. Enjoy it.

Update:

Update: Today, soon after, filing this short review of “A Lonely Man”, news broke that the US says Russian intelligence agencies were behind the poisoning of Alexey Navalny and will impose sanctions on multiple senior government officials.

It is at times like this that it becomes difficult to diffrentiate between truth and fiction. Alexey Navalny is one of the Russian figures mentioned in the novel, as being one of the severest critics of Putin and having to suffer consequences like many others have in the past.

1 March 2021

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