‘Then I saw the town, and the words arose in my head, as clearly as if they were being spoken: This will be the place’
One Boat
Written by Jonathan Buckley
- Longlisted
- The Booker Prize 2025
- Published by Fitzcarraldo Editions
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Artfully constructed, absorbing and insightful, One Boat grapples with questions of identity, free will, guilt and responsibility
On losing her father, Teresa returns to a small town on the Greek coast – the same place she visited when grieving her mother nine years ago. She immerses herself again in the life of the town, observing the inhabitants going about their business, a quiet backdrop for her reckoning with herself. An episode from her first visit resurfaces vividly – her encounter with John, a man struggling to come to terms with the violent death of his nephew.
Soon Teresa encounters some of the people she met last time around: Petros, an eccentric mechanic, whose life story may or may not be part of John’s; the beautiful Niko, a diving instructor; and Xanthe, a waitress in one of the cafés on the leafy town square. They talk about their longings, regrets, the passing of time, their sense of who they are.
Jonathan Buckley
Jonathan Buckley is a British writer and editor from the West Midlands, now living in Brighton, UK
More about Jonathan Buckley Buckley creates a novel of quiet brilliance and sly humour, packed with mystery and indeterminacy
The Booker Prize 2025 judges
What the judges said
‘Following the death of her father, Teresa returns to the small coastal town in Greece she first visited when her mother died nearly a decade before. From this scenario, tacking between the events of the second trip and memories of the first, Buckley creates a novel of quiet brilliance and sly humour, packed with mystery and indeterminacy. The way in which the book interleaves Teresa’s relationship to her mother, her involvement in an amateur murder investigation, and an account of a love affair, raises questions about grief, obsession, personhood and human connectivity we found to be as stimulating as they are complex.’
What the critics said
Frances Wilson, Times Literary Supplement
‘Jonathan Buckley’s strange, sly and self-assured novel, in which both nothing and everything happens, is about thinking and overthinking… There is a great deal of freight on board One Boat, but it packs so neatly into 168 pages that it never feels overburdened. This is a novel to be returned to as a place in which to think, just as Teresa returns to her Greek town.’
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