The Booker shortlist pitches risk against realism

Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter is in the solidly executed camp. It follows the tangled lives of two newlywed couples in the West Country during the big freeze of 1962. Here is sex, work, rural life, the shadow of war, simmering family history, and no gimmicks: just emotional veracity, steadily unspooled, with sparing doses of high drama.

But the problem with prize lists is that, as Doyle pointed out, the judges have to keep rereading the book. The suspicion is that uncomplicated admiration without anything to argue over can count against a novel in these circumstances. This might also stand against Ben Markovits’s The Rest of Our Lives, a road-trip novel about a law lecturer who makes good on a long-held vow to walk out on his wife as payback for infidelity. Told in the first person, it’s real, direct, companionable, and akin to Anne Tyler, who is a clear influence on the book.

As well as these inarguably well-made novels, the judges look just as keen on the kind of book that takes a bigger swing, even if it doesn’t strike cleanly. Might this year’s panel – all novelists beside SJP – be especially sympathetic to the imperfect book?

Susan Choi’s Flashlight is a multigenerational family saga that turns on the legacy of a father’s disappearance from a Japanese beach. The story is constructed in such a way as to withhold information for readers who need their eyes opened (I was one) to the complex history of 20th-century relations between the US, Japan and the Koreas.

Choi told The Observer this year that it began as an attempt to write a novel about that history in the manner of the slim German novella Visitation, by Jenny Erpenbeck, whose oblique narration defamiliarises the Holocaust to make it horrifying anew. But Choi understandably came to feel that not enough of her audience would know the novel’s history to begin with, and I think Flashlight – even in its non-political parts – shows the strain of figuring out what to include and what to omit. It’s a powerful story, but I can’t believe that the judges’ appetite won’t wane just a little fourth time around.

A similar challenge to readers is posed by Kiran Desai’s 680-page The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, written over 20 years. A tender, funny, wise love story set between Delhi and Brooklyn from the mid-90s to 9/11, reflecting on the experience of being Indian in America and American in India, with a dash, too, of the supernatural, it has plenty to offer – possibly too much. Desai drifts between a vast cast of characters in leisurely fashion, not too worried about whether we’re keeping pace or not. Perhaps readerly attention span wasn’t uppermost on her mind in the time that she has been writing it – the project began when smartphones weren’t a thing, and I think it shows.

David Szalay’s Flesh, which gives us nine episodes in the life of a Hungarian ex-convict who settles in the UK after fighting in Iraq, couldn’t be less similar. The grabby opening – about the protagonist’s uneasy sexual relationship with an older woman in his teens – enacts a series of breathtaking reversals before the next chapter takes us somewhere else entirely.

His style – almost an anti-style – produces impressive level of comedy, pathos and drama from a brutally restricted register: a lot of the dialogue is the protagonist saying “OK”. I could have read 3,000 pages of it – and I think Szalay could have written them too, because his storytelling engine generates such momentum that winding it down becomes tricky. It’s a great book that doesn’t quite stick the landing.

What to say about Katie Kitamura’s Audition? This may be the biggest swing of the lot. It’s narrated by a New York actor, in two chronologically consecutive segments set in subtly yet pivotally opposed realities. The fussy, self-correcting voice annoyed me when I first read it and it still irritates me now. Maybe it’s the first novel to truly embody the Trump era, constantly grabbing your attention but unable to be trusted for a moment.

An anti-novel designed to dramatise the complicated nature of selfhood? Perhaps. Kitamura has spoken of her admiration for David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, but where that film mines a broad range of emotion, Audition feels lost in its own arid caveats. I hated it, and yet it has remained on my mind all year – which might well be a sign of a novel built to last the judging process. Even just trying to figure out what’s actually going on will keep the panel arguing right up to the last minute of their final conclave before announcing the winner on 10 November. It couldn’t be more different from a novel such as Miller’s A Land in Winter – but deciding that apples are better than oranges, or vice versa, is ultimately the name of the game when it comes to the Booker.

The 2025 Booker prize shortlist

Flashlight by Susan Choi (Vintage Publishing, £20)

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai (Hamish Hamilton, £25)

Audition by Katie Kitamura (Fern Press, £18.99)

The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits (Faber & Faber, £16.99)

The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller (Sceptre, £10.99)

Flesh by David Szalay (Jonathan Cape, £18.99)

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