Tag: Booker shortlist 2025

Booker shortlist review #5 – “Flashlight” by Susan Choi

This is my last review from last year’s Booker Prize shortlist and comes from American novelist Susan Choi. This is her sixth novel and her other works have been highly acclaimed although she had not crossed my radar before now. Flashlight is a novel with a wide scope, spanning several decades to tell the story of one family. That family comprises Serk, his wife Anne and their daughter Louisa. Seek was born in Korea. His family moved to Japan when he was young but were then lured back to the new Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea). Serk refused to go and later moved to the United States where he became an academic. In the US he meets and marries Anne and they have Louisa. Anne’s son from an earlier relationship, Tobias, is also significant. She was largely estranged from him until his teenage years, kept apart by the boy’s father. There are a handful of other minor characters.

The story begins with a drowning – Serk and 10 year old Louisa are walking on a beach in Japan; Serk is undertaking an academic secondment there and has taken his family with him. Water and swimming are recurring motifs in the book and Serk cannot swim. The pair do not return home after their evening walk and Louisa is found on the beach the next morning, alive but unconscious. She has no recollection about what has happened to her father and he is presumed drowned. This is a monumental event in the young girl’s life. She is precocious and intelligent and has a difficult relationship with her mother, Anne. Serk and Anne had a difficult relationship and there was tension in the household which Louisa seems to have imbibed. It does not help that Anne has a mysterious chronic illness which limits her mobility and leaves her constantly fatigued. 

The plot looks backwards then, to Serk’s childhood in Japan and his family’s move to North Korea; they are outsiders in Japan, not welcomed, and are attracted by the offer of employment, housing and a good lifestyle in the new state, where they will feel more secure in their identity. Serk cannot think of going to North Korea and will instead move to the United States where he becomes an academic, though he will always feel somewhat on the outside. 

We also learn of Anne’s back story, how she had a child as a young woman, fathered by an older man, who then prevents her from seeing him. When she meets and marries Serk it seems like a match of convenience for both of them. Anne’s first child, Tobias, comes back into the story later on, when as a young man he seeks to develop a relationship with his mother and half-sister Louisa.

Louisa is a somewhat troubled child and, like her father, seems always to feel like she does not quite fit in. When the family moves to Japan she works hard to learn the language and blend in, but her father’s disappearance puts paid to her sense of belonging. We learn how she struggles at university and has mixed feelings towards her mother, from whom she seems remote and different.

There is a plot twist which I will obviously not share here, which gave the book some interest and purpose, but overall I found I did not love this novel. It is long, not a problem in itself, but I felt there was a great deal here that felt superfluous, for example, the lengthy accounts of Anne’s life and routines in the retirement village where she lives in her older age felt to me like they added very little to the story. The author writes a great character, but I really did not like any of them! Apart from Tobias, perhaps, and Walt, Anne’s friend, although both are quite marginal characters. There were also parts of the plot that I felt lacked credibility – for example, Louisa’s experience at the hands of border police in England made me cringe! The editor really should have got a British reader to look at this – we just don’t speak like that! This was a shame because for me it detracted from the really important story at the heart of the novel, the reach and cruelty of the North Korean regime, something I knew very little about. 

I listened to the novel on audio and I feel the narration was not the best. That did not help. I feel this novel could have been somewhat better. 

I don’t think the 2025 Booker Prize shortlist was a particularly strong one – the winning book (Flesh by David Szalay) was one of the top two for me, but I did prefer Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter. The fact of two very long books slowed my reading right down. I love a long novel but both this novel, Flashlight, and Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny felt like something of a slog. 

I would find this a difficult novel to recommend.

Booker shortlist book review #4 – “Audition” by Katie Kitamura

This was my penultimate read of the 2025 Booker shortlist. I finished it over the Christmas holiday but it has taken a while to get my blogging act together so far in 2026. (I have also now completed my final book of the shortlist, Flashlight by Susan Choi, which was long and took me a few weeks to get through). Audition is Katie Kitamura’s fifth novel and she is an established writer and literary figure, earning praise and plaudits from many high profile figures as well as being shortlisted for other prizes. I was familiar with her name but I had not read any of her work before. 

Coming in at just over 200 pages, Audition feels more like a novella than a novel to me. It also has the atmosphere of a dark thriller and an ending which seem s more consistent with the novella format. Set in Manhattan the central character is a successful actress in her middle years who has achieved popular and critical acclaim and lives a settled and comfortable life. She is married to Tomas, a writer, and they live in the city, sharing the sorts of routines and rituals that anyone in a long-term relationship would recognise. They drink a little too much wine and eat a little too much pastry but otherwise their life is relatively unremarkable. Our central character remains unnamed.

Life is easy, that is until one day the actress meets Xavier, a young man who, over a slightly clandestine lunch, claims to be her son. She tells him this is impossible – she was pregnant once, but she had an abortion as it was not the right time for her and Tomas to have a family. Xavier is undeterred in his pursuit, however.

At first, the actress tries to keep her meeting with Xavier secret from Tomas; she did fear that he had spotted her at the initial lunch and that perhaps he might have thought she was having an affair, which would explain an apparent change in his behaviour towards her. But Xavier gradually infiltrates the couple’s life, getting a job supporting the director on the play the actress is working on (where she is alarmed to find how indispensable he makes himself). Furthermore, Tomas also seems to be seduced by Xavier and far from being suspicious, welcomes Xavier into their home, almost at the expense of their own relationship. 

The actress observes all the events with increasing dismay, unable to comprehend or to influence Xavier’s actions and events soon spiral out of her control. 

I found the book quite compelling to read; it moves at a good pace and the characters are interesting, but, I’m afraid for me it was ultimately unconvincing. I disliked the ending, which left too many loose ends and unresolved questions for my taste and I found myself asking what the point of the novel was. 

I would like to read Kitamura’s 2021 novel Intimacies, which was highly acclaimed. Audition it seems to me, has been less well received. I’m slightly surprised it was shortlisted, especially when I look at the books that did not make it. 

A fairly quick and interesting read but not highly rewarding for me.

Booker shortlist review #2 – “The Loneliness of Sonia & Sunny” by Kiran Desai

This was the longest of the books shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize. At almost 700 pages it was nearly half as long again as the next biggest, Susan Choi’s Flashlight (464 pages). I do enjoy a long book – the longest ever Booker shortlisted novel was Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport (2019), a book I loved and the stream of consciousness style of which suited its length. This book, I am not so sure.

The two main characters are Sonia and Sunny, Indian immigrants living in the United States. Sonia has recently graduated from college in Vermont. She wants to be a novelist but lacks motivation and application. At the start of the novel she is in a relationship with a much older man, an established and renowned artist who evades commitment and who exploits her youth, beauty and biddable nature. 

Sunny is the only child of a widowed mother, and is working as a journalist with the Associated Press in New York, dreaming of his big break but struggling to make an impact. He is in a long-term relationship with his American girlfriend, but when he meets her parents, the gulf between them and their respective cultures becomes clear. 

Sonia and Sunny’s family backgrounds are illustrated in detail and a powerful and rich canvas is painted by the author, drawing out the importance of tradition in Indian culture, but also the rapidity of change in that society. Sonia and Sunny’s grandparents, for example, are firmly in the past and struggle with the new realities whether this is in relation to public administration, marriage traditions or technology. Their parents’ generation straddles the past and the present and all are still trying to work out how to navigate the new realities. 

Sonia and Sunny represent the Indian dream, trying to establish themselves in the west, and make a career which matches their academic credentials but always rubbing up against hostile attitudes to immigrants and shaken by the culture clashes. They are first made aware of each other in the most traditional Indian way when Sonia’s grandfather approaches Sunny’s grandfather (a chess-playing companion) to try and arrange a meeting between the two. Sunny’s family goes through the motions of promising to introduce them whilst privately regarding the approach with contempt given the social gap between the two families.

It will be some time later that Sonia and Sunny meet in person, in India, for Sonia’s grandfather’s funeral. Will they strike up a romance, ironic, given their respective families’ attempt to match/eschew them? Or have they become far too American for such arrangements?

The real irony of the situation is expressed in the title of the book – both young people are lonely, in relationships of their own choosing which not only fail to fulfil them on either a romantic or a cultural level, but which verge on toxic. In the case of both of them, their partners cannot connect with their Indian cultural sensibilities, or even their immigrant sensibilities.

I did enjoy this book, but with caveats. I have loved many an Indian epic novel – I count Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance and Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy among my all-time favourite reads – but this one did not quite do it for me. I do think the background cast of characters, Sonia and Sunny’s extended families, was important in portraying modern India, what has changed and what hasn’t, but there were times when the level of detail felt too much. Towards the end, for example, the account of Sonia’s father’s illness and his experience of his treatment, felt unnecessary. And the lengthy chapters with Elon, Sonia’s artist lover, also felt drawn out more than was necessary; or perhaps it just felt that way to me because he was so ghastly! I’m afraid I do think some judicious editing was called for. 

The author handled all the many complex themes – loneliness, disillusion, the problem of the outsider, the clash of cultures, and the transformation of the vast nation of India – with aplomb, but I do think the narrative could have been tightened. 

The book is an achievement that is worth a read, but it would not have been winner-level for me. I listened to it on audio and it was beautifully read by Sneha Mathan.

Booker shortlist review #1 – “The Rest of Our Lives” by Ben Markovits

The winner of this year’s Booker Prize was announced last week and it was David Szalay’s Flesh. It was this author’s second attempt, having been nominated for All That Man Is in 2016 – the year I started this blog. That was also the first year I set myself the goal of reading all the novels on the shortlist – I don’t think I managed it that year either! (I have no idea how on earth the judges manage to get through so many books – they must have to forego all other meaningful activity for months!) When this year’s shortlist was announced a month or so ago I gave myself a fifty percent chance of getting through the shortlist before the announcement.


Well, predictably, I only got through half the books in time (I already had Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter under my belt), although I did manage to get through Anita Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sonny, all 700 pages of it, which has to be an achievement in itself. 

The first book that I decided to tackle was Ben Markovits’s The Rest of Our Lives – according to the blurb it was about a man in mid-life whose children are leaving home to go to college and so it seemed to chime with some aspects of my life right now. I also noted that the author is a lecturer in creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London, where I did my own undergraduate degree in English, so, a happy coincidence.

The central character is Tom, an academic in law, in his fifties, living in New York city with his wife Amy. It is clear that Tom has reached a state of disillusionment with his life. Amy had an affair some years earlier and it is clear that their marriage has never really recovered from this shock. Tom has been waiting until their children have left home before leaving his wife. Tom and Amy’s elder child Michael is at college in California, and when their daughter Miri goes to college in Pittsburgh, Tom drives her there and the moment of reckoning arrives. 

The journey to Pittsburgh is long – around seven hours (which makes my 3 hour journeys to drop my kids off seem pathetic!). After delivering Miri, Tom decides to keep going, not to go back to New York. He tells Amy that he is going to visit an old pal who has been seeking his advice on a legal matter. He keeps driving. 

In the background we learn of Tom’s health complaints, a swollen face every morning that no doctor has yet been able to diagnose satisfactorily. A friend of mine recently described middle age as being like ‘sniper’s alley’ when it comes to health – you can eat well, exercise, avoid smoking or drinking too much, do all the right things, and yet some nasty disease might still get you. It’s true, and one becomes acutely aware of this in middle age. We learn of Tom’s professional disappointments, never having quite attained the goals he hoped he might. He revisits a number of old friends and finds the relationships are not quite how he imagined. What will Tom do with the level of mediocrity he finds himself in?

This is a road trip novel where the central character goes on a journey of self-examination. This could be a cliche if it was not handled extremely well. And I’m afraid that, for me, it was not handled extremely well. I found the author’s writing style languorous and dull. The ending was abrupt and it felt like the author had just got rather bored with his story and decided to stop. The characters lacked spark. The most interesting character for me was actually Michael’s girlfriend Betty, although I am not sure what purpose she served in the novel, except to show Tom how things might have been if he’d made some different choices.

This was not a bad novel, but I find it quite hard to believe that it was considered Booker shortlist-standard, especially a shortlist that omits Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche’s Dream Count. 

Unfortunately, I find this book difficult to recommend.