The Booker longlist is here — and it’s anything but boring.
This year’s 10 books take us from shrimp-shanking on a foggy British coast to a gold-bar murder on a Yorkshire farm, from trains where strangers meet and fall in love to Greek cafés where grief lingers like cigarette smoke.
And we at Penguin are celebrating big: five of these bold, brilliant titles are by our authors, including Kiran Desai’s luminous new novel The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny.
The Books Everyone Will Be Talking About
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai (Penguin Random House India)
When Sonia and Sunny first glimpse each other on an overnight train, they are captivated — yet haunted by their families’ failed matchmaking in the past. Sonia, an aspiring novelist back in India after a painful chapter abroad, and Sunny, a struggling journalist fleeing family strife in New York, embark on a search for happiness together. Spanning continents and generations, this is a sweeping tale of love, family, and the alienations of our modern world — and Kiran Desai at her most ambitious yet.
Seascraper by Benjamin Wood (Penguin Random House UK)
Thomas lives a quiet, unchanging life scraping for shrimp on a gloomy British beach, until a charismatic American visitor promises him a future beyond the horizon. This haunting and timeless novel captures the tension between a life constrained by circumstance and the risky pursuit of dreams.
Audition by Katie Kitamura (Penguin Random House UK)
An actress and a much younger man meet for lunch in Manhattan. Who are they to each other? And what truths lie beneath the performances of their everyday lives? With her trademark precision, Kitamura unspools two competing narratives, rewriting our understanding of intimacy, identity, and the roles we play.
Flashlight by Susan Choi (Penguin Random House UK)
From post-war Japan to suburban America and the North Korean regime, Choi crafts a generational saga teeming with intelligence and heart. When ten-year-old Louisa’s father vanishes on a coastal walk, the reverberations of that night echo across decades and continents in this hypnotic, layered novel.
Flesh by David Szalay (Penguin Random House UK)
An unflinching meditation on mortality, vulnerability, and desire, Szalay’s novel confronts the very essence of what it means to inhabit a human body.
The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits (Faber & Faber)
A poignant and often humorous road trip novel that asks: what’s left when your children are grown and the roles that once defined you have shifted? Markovits delivers a compassionate portrait of long-term marriage and midlife reckoning.
Universality by Natasha Brown (Faber & Faber)
On a Yorkshire farm, a man is brutally bludgeoned with a gold bar, leading a young journalist deep into a web of power, rhetoric, and rebellion. With the incisiveness that made Assembly a critical hit, Brown delivers a slippery, daring novel about truth, language, and how narratives shape our world.
Love Forms by Claire Adam (Faber & Faber)
Dawn Bishop left Trinidad as a teenager and gave up her baby for adoption in Venezuela. Decades later, a stranger contacts her claiming to be that lost child. In this tender, heart-wrenching story, Adam explores motherhood, longing, and the many forms that love can take.
Misinterpretation by Ledia Xhoga (Daunt Books)
An Albanian interpreter in New York becomes entangled in the traumas of those she translates for — and in her own buried memories. Propulsive and unsettling, Xhoga’s debut is a sharp meditation on compassion, communication, and the cost of unchecked altruism.
One Boat by Jonathan Buckley (Fitzcarraldo Editions)
After her father’s death, Teresa returns to a small Greek coastal town to grieve, reflect, and revisit her past encounters there. Quietly powerful and exquisitely constructed, Buckley’s novel grapples with identity, free will, and the enduring ties that bind us.
Celebrating storytelling without borders
It’s fearless. It’s genre-blurring. It’s full of books that will make you think, feel, and maybe even yell a little.
The shortlist drops in September, and the winner will be revealed later this year. Until then, start reading — these are the books everyone will be talking about.
Which one are you picking up first?
