The 13 titles explore a vast range of remarkable, relatable human experiences – lived and imagined, told audaciously and authentically. Sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes hilarious, these are the experiences of individuals on the margins of society or made invisible by those in positions of power; they’re the experiences of your next-door neighbour or an ordinary person on the other side of the world. In very different ways, they are stories of survival: surviving personal and political history; surviving within a body or community; fighting for one’s life; fighting the future and the past. The book’s settings may feel close to home or a million miles from your own life, but the experiences and emotions captured by the longlisted writers and translators are those that anyone, anywhere in the world, will recognise: love, grief, fear, rage, joy, and more.  

Here you’ll also find books that push at the boundaries of what literature can do – from speculative fiction to the semi-autobiographical, from body horror to distant-future sci-fi; from stories spanning thousands of years to a single, endlessly-repeated day; from the first work in an ambitious septology to a queer classic, first published in its original language four decades ago.  

There’s a book here for anyone interested in what it means to be human, in what our planet looks like through the eyes of others, and in the power of fiction to challenge our assumptions and prejudices, and to bring different cultures together.  

So, what are the books actually about? 

From the weight of family history to the spectre of human extinction, each book on the longlist offers something fresh, challenging and rewarding. Among them are several works based on personal experiences, or inspired by real events. 

Solenoid is partly inspired by Mircea Cărtărescu’s years as a teacher in Romania – although it spirals into a bizarre account of history, philosophy and mathematics, with flashes of nightmarish body horror. The book is said to have been written in a single draft, with no revisions occuring before publication. At 627 pages it’s by far the longest book on the list. As a whole, the longlisted books pack big themes into compact form: eight of them are under 200 pages. 

Hunchback – the shortest book on the list, at 97 pages – is an unflinching account of sexual desire and disability – its protagonist is born with a congenital muscle disorder, and uses an electric wheelchair, as does the book’s author, Saou Ichikawa. It’s been hailed as one of Japan’s most important novels of the 21^st century. 

The protagonist of Eurotrash by Christian Kracht – a Swiss writer who has been compared to Nick Hornby and Bret Easton Ellis – is a Swiss writer named Christian, who embarks on a tragicomic road trip with his wealthy, elderly mother. 

Vincent Delecroix’s Small Boat is the fictional account of a group of migrants’ attempt to cross the English Channel in an inflatable dinghy in 2021, which results in the deaths of 27 of those on board. It’s told from the point of view of a French woman who received –but rejected – their desperate calls for help. 

A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre captures the love and despair of an intense friendship between the book’s narrator and his best friend from childhood, who suffers from severe psychological disorders. It was written in the aftermath of the death of the author’s younger sister. 
 
Other books on the list provide a leap of literary imagination, grounded in society’s biggest concerns and our darkest personal fears. The shocking premise of Ibtisam Azem’s The Book of Disappearance can be summed up in a sentence: what would happen if all the Palestinians in Israel suddenly disappeared? 

In Solvej Balle‘s On the Calculation of Volume I, a woman is trapped in a time loop, waking up each morning to find it’s the 18^th of November, again and again. The first title in a proposed septology, the original Danish edition (Balle began writing it in 1999) was self-published – translation rights have now been sold in over 20 countries. 

Hiromi Kawakami’s Under the Eye of the Big Bird leaps back and forth across thousands of years and finds humankind on the verge of extinction, but still clinging to the impulses that make us human. 

Other books on the list are moored in everyday day – messy, mundane and magical – featuring characters trying to escape their current circumstances and live a better life. 

In Gaëlle Bélem’s There’s a Monster Behind the Door, set in the 1980s in Réunion (an overseas department of France, in the Indian Ocean), a young girl with a zest for life rises up against her jaded, bitter parents. In On a Woman’s Madness by Astrid Roemer, a courageous Black woman flees her abusive husband to embark a new life in the Surinamese capital. Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection finds an expat couple attempting to live their dream in Berlin, but finding themselves beset with the dissatisfaction and ennui of the modern world. 

Perhaps you prefer a short-story collection? In which case Dahlia de la Cerda’s streetwise and funny Reservoir Bitches follows the efforts of 13 memorable Mexican woman – from the daughter of a cartel boss to a victim of transfemicide – to survive against the odds. Finally, Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq – an activist and lawyer – vividly captures the extraordinary everyday lives of Muslim women and girls in southern India, in 12 stories, which were originally published in Kannada between 1990 and 2023. 

Unfamiliar voices, award winners and IBP alumni  

None of this year’s nominated authors have appeared on the International Booker Prize longlist before, but they are far from ‘unknowns’. Several may be unfamiliar to anglophone audiences, but they have already garnered plenty of awards and accolades in their home countries and beyond.  

Astrid Roemer received the Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren (Dutch Literature Prize) in 2021, becoming its first Surinamese-Dutch winner; the original French edition of Gaëlle Bélem’s There’s a Monster Behind the Door won France’s Grand prix du roman métis in 2020; in 2022, Anne Serre won the Prix Goncourt de la Nouvelle (for short stories); Vincent Delecroix won France’s Grand Prix de Littérature de l’Académie française in 2009 for his entire body of work; Swiss author Christian Kracht won Germany’s Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize in 2012 for his bestselling novel Imperium; On the Calculation of Volume I won 2022’s prestigious Nordic Council Literature Prize and was a word-of-mouth hit in Denmark; Banu Mushtaq has won India’s Karnataka Sahitya Academy and Daana Chintamani Attimabbe awards; bestselling author Hiromi Kawakami was shortlisted for 2014’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (the precursor of the IBP) and has won numerous Japanese awards, including the Akutagawa and Tanizaki prizes; Saou Ichikawa won the Akutagawa Prize, too, in 2023, becoming the first writer with a physical disability to do so. Her book Hunchback is a literary phenomenon in Japan.  

While all 13 original authors are making their International Booker Prize debut this year, three of the translators have been longlisted before. Sophie Hughes, translator of Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection, was longlisted four times previously, most recently in 2022 – she is now the translator with the most IBP nominations, with five in total. Helen Stevenson, translator of Vincent Delecroix’s Small Boat, was longlisted in 2017, while Julia Sanches, co-translator of Dahlia de la Cerda’s Reservoir Bitches, is longlisted for the third consecutive year.  

There are three debut books on the longlist; two novels (There’s a Monster Behind the Door and Hunchback) and a short-story collection (Reservoir Bitches). A further five books  mark their authors’ first English-language publication: The Book of Disappearance, Small Boat, Perfection, Heart Lamp and On a Woman’s Madness. The latter, regarded as a classic of queer literature, was first published in Dutch in 1982 – 43 years ago. This is the longest gap between an original-language publication and the longlisting of an English-language translation in International Booker history. At 77, the book’s author Astrid Roemer is the oldest writer on the longlist.  

There are two short-story collections on the longlist (short-story collections are eligible for the IBP but not the original Booker Prize): Reservoir Bitches and Heart Lamp. A short-story collection has not yet won the International Booker Prize. Could this be the year?  

A kaleidoscope of countries and languages  

10 original languages are represented on the longlist: Arabic, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Romanian and Spanish. Heart Lamp becomes the first book nominated for the IBP that was originally written in Kannada, the first language of some 38 million people, which is spoken predominantly in southern India.  

The longlist also includes authors representing a range of nationalities: Danish, French, Indian, Italian, Japanese, Palestinian, Romanian, Mexican, Swiss and Surinamese-Dutch. Romania is represented on the longlist for the first time.  

The longlisted translators, meanwhile, represent seven countries: Iraq, France, Brazil, Japan, India, the USA and UK. Sinan Antoon, translator of The Book of Disappearance, is the first Iraqi translator to appear on the International Booker longlist. The book’s author, Ibtisam Azem, is the second Palestinian author to be longlisted.  

Another good year for indies  

Twelve of the longlisted books are published by 11 independent publishers – the highest number of indies ever. The previous highest was eight, including in 2024. Only one book on the longlist isn’t published by an indie (Saou Ichikawa’s Hunchback, published by Viking). 

Five of the longlisted publishers have won the International Booker Prize before. Pushkin Press (longlisted for Solenoid) won with At Night All Blood is Black in 2021, Tilted Axis (longlisted for On a Woman’s Madness) won with Tomb of Sand in 2022, Fitzcarraldo (longlisted for Perfection) won with Flights in 2018, Faber (longlisted for On the Calculation of Volume I) won with The Discomfort of Evening in 2020 and Granta (longlisted for Under the Eye of the Big Bird won with Kairos in 2024.  

Two books on the longlist (The Book of Disappearance and Heart Lamp) are published by Sheffield-based And Other Stories, and two publishers are represented for the first time: Small Axes (part of Leeds-based Hope Road), publishers of Small Boat, and Ireland’s Bullaun Press, publishers of There’s a Monster Behind the Door.  

So, which book are you reading first?