It’s long been said that it’s the journey that counts and not the destination, but in some circumstances – like in the final pages of these novels – the ending really does make all the difference. Whether it’s a nail-biting cliffhanger or an unexpected revelation, powerful endings can mean a book stays with you for years to come. 

If you’re in the mood to have the rug pulled from underneath you, or to have multiple narrative threads tied up in the neatest way possible, dive into these thrilling Booker Prize-nominated books. They will undoubtedly leave a lasting impact, but don’t worry, we’ve avoided any major spoilers.

Atonement by Ian McEwan

Set across three time periods – 1935, 1940 and 1999 – Ian McEwan’s modern classic, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2001, is a case of misunderstandings and regrets. Thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis finds herself instigating a devastating series of events after she witnesses what she believes to be a crime between her older sister, Cecilia, and the son of a servant, Robbie Turner. 

The novel’s emotional sucker punch of an ending is certainly one readers won’t forget anytime soon. Yet it nearly didn’t happen, as McEwan revealed in an interview with the Times that he considered shelving the novel’s revelatory epilogue.

James Wood writes in The New Republic that ‘Atonement ends with a devastating twist, a piece of information that changes our sense of everything we have just read… This twist, this revelation, further emphasises the novel’s already explicit ambivalence about being a novel, and makes the book a proper postmodern artefact, wearing its doubts on its sleeve, on the outside, as the Pompidou does its escalators.’

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood’s dystopian thriller, now almost four decades old, has lost none of its impact or relevance since it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1986. Set in a United States ruled by an oppressive military dictatorship and renamed the Republic of Gilead, the novel follows the rebellious Offred, one of many women whose purpose in life has been reduced to bearing children for Gilead’s ruling elite.

With a powerful yet ambiguous ending that leaves Offred’s fate unclear, readers had to wait 34 years to find out what happened to the protagonist, with Atwood publishing the sequel – and Booker Prize winner – The Testaments in 2019.

Writing for the Booker Prizes website, novelist Naomi Alderman called The Handmaid’s Tale a book ‘that is perfectly observed but also gripping, which takes its time but is continually moving on. It’s literature with all the gifts: deeply-realised characterisation, thrilling plot, utterly convincing world-building, sentence-by-sentence majesty.’

His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet

Graeme Macrae Burnet’s second book is a work of fiction that’s often mistaken for true crime. Set in a remote crofting community in Scotland in 1869, it is constructed as a series of fictional historical documents that tell the story of Roderick Macrae, a young man accused of a grisly triple murder. The book was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2016. 

Through newspaper articles, Roderick’s memoir and court transcripts, Macrae Burnet establishes that Roderick has committed the crime on the very first page. What remains unclear are the reasons why he did it. The book ends with Roderick’s trial, and Macrae Burnet leaves readers reeling with various twists and many unanswered questions.

In the Financial Times, Barry Forshaw wrote: ‘Whatever the genre, few readers will be able to put down His Bloody Project as it speeds towards a surprising (and ultimately puzzling) conclusion.’

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

Stevens is a loyal and traditional butler, having served at Darlington Hall for over three decades. Reserved and emotionally repressed, he decides to take a road trip to visit a former colleague, Darlington’s ex-housekeeper Miss Kenton. While driving through the English countryside, he looks back on his life and considers what’s required of an ideal butler.

The winner of the Booker Prize in 1989, The Remains of the Day reaches its quietly devastating and poignant ending after an unexpected realisation allows Stevens to understand what he has truly lost. Another Booker winner, Salman Rushdie said, ‘It’s a cruel and beautiful conclusion to a story both beautiful and cruel.’

In the Guardian, Peter Beech wrote: ‘The story reaches its low-key climax in the quiet surroundings of a Cornish tea-room. I won’t spoil it for you, except to say that, here as elsewhere, what is not said makes all the difference.’

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce

After Harold Fry receives an unexpected letter from an old colleague and former friend, Queenie, he impulsively decides to take a walk that spans 600 miles. With his friend in a hospice, he believes that, as long as he keeps walking, she will live. Harold uses the journey to reflect on his life, including his relationships with his wife Maureen and son David, and the effects of his own traumatic childhood. 

The novel, longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2012, builds towards a heart-wrenching, bittersweet conclusion that slowly reveals several truths. In the New York Times, Janet Maslin described the ending as ‘much more powerful than the rest. Yet the sad, grotesque aspects of these final scenes are balanced by a sense of the miraculous that seems credible and hard won.’

In the Guardian, Natasha Tripney wrote: ‘The story is laced with loneliness, with life’s numerous small disappointments and the great grey weight of the real; the last chapters deliver a couple of unexpectedly savage emotional blows. But this is tempered with a sense of quiet celebration.’

Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Michael Hofmann

The winner of the International Booker Prize in 2024, Kairos is the story of a complex and destructive love affair, set against the last days of East Germany’s Communist republic. 

Katharina is a 19-year-old student who meets Hans, a married 53-year-old writer, on a bus and they embark on a passionate affair. Manipulative, possessive and arrogant, Hans becomes increasingly controlling towards Katharina as their relationship turns toxic. With an ending that provides readers with more questions than answers, Katharina discovers the truth behind the man she once loved. 

According to Amber Ruth Paulen from Full Stop, ‘Erpenbeck proves the impossibility, irresponsibility even, of an easy binary and reminds us that the only thing we can be certain of is an ending that will bring along change.’

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

With one of the most devastating endings in modern fiction, A Little Life explores the traumatic life of Jude St. Francis. A deeply complex character who has suffered immense injustice and personal tragedy, Jude’s narrative is plagued with pain, guilt and feelings of unworthiness. While he has a successful career and a close group of loving friends, Jude struggles with his sense of identity and how he sees himself in the world. 

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2015, the book ends with a series of tragic events that have left many readers feeling emotionally shattered. 

In The New Yorker, John Michaud wrote: ‘What makes the book’s treatment of abuse and suffering subversive is that it does not offer any possibility of redemption and deliverance… It gives us a moral universe in which spiritual salvation does not exist.’

In an article for the Booker Prizes website, award-winning singer-songwriter and avid reader Dua Lipa wrote that A Little Life was ‘one of the first books where I openly sobbed after reading. By the end of it I felt profoundly changed.’

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

In an unnamed city dominated by violence, students Saeed and Nadia fall in love. Nadia is an independent and rebellious young woman who doesn’t feel part of her home country. Saeed is more conservative and a romantic at heart, whose sense of belonging is tied up with his family and the deep love he feels for them. As rumours begin to surface about hidden doors that serve as portals to other destinations, Nadia and Saeed travel to Mykonos, London and California to escape their turbulent home country. 

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2017, Exit West’s ending is bittersweet, involving a time jump and a full-circle moment for the two refugees.

In the National Book Review, Margot Singer wrote: ‘Although the reader yearns for a love story’s happy ending, Saeed and Nadia have nothing but “transient beginnings and middles” as their attempts at intimacy are strained by the migrations they must brave.’

The Safekeep by Yael van der Woulden

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2024, The Safekeep is a story of obsession and control, set 15 years after the Second World War. Reclusive Isabel is living in her late mother’s home in the Dutch countryside when her older brother Louis introduces his flamboyant new girlfriend Eva into her life. As Eva stays on for the summer, Isabel’s structured and strict routine starts to unravel, and her hidden desires begin to surface. 

After a startling revelation and unexpected insight, van der Woulden ends the novel in a way that Guardian writer Rachel Seiffert called ‘inspired’. According to Seiffert, ‘the detail revealed in the last act still has the power to kick you in the gut…The book’s powerful final act provides an already weighty emotional situation with an extra layer of historical heft.’

Audition by Katie Kitamura

A successful middle-aged actress in New York City has lunch with an attractive young man who claims to be her son. What happens next jolts readers into two different realities that defy rational explanation. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2025, Audition is a destabilising mystery about the multiple roles we all play and whether we ever truly know the people closest to us.

Speaking to Interview Magazine, Kitamura said: ‘I wanted to invite the reader to step inside and to create the book with me. It was important to create footholds, points of stability and shared reference, so that the book had the foundation from which multiple variations or interpretations could grow.’ The book’s ambiguous ending perfectly reflects Kitamura’s intentions, confounding expectations for a narrative resolution that makes sense of it all, while ensuring the novel and its characters linger long in the mind.

In the San Francisco Chronicle Ann Levin wrote: ‘Kitamura does a good job of creating a sense of the uncanny and feeling of dread. Reality is unstable; nothing is as it seems.’

The Mirror & the Light by Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel wrapped up her acclaimed Wolf Hall trilogy with The Mirror & the Light, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2020. Detailing the final years in the life of Henry VIII’s ruthless advisor Thomas Cromwell, the book follows on from the beheading of Anne Boleyn and Cromwell’s continued rise in status and influence. Mantel’s previous two books in the series, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, both won the Booker Prize in 2009 and 2012.

Based on historical events, the tragic conclusion comes as no surprise to most, yet the way Mantel tells it is remarkably fresh and powerful. In the Guardian Stephanie Merritt wrote: ‘We all know how the story ends. And this is where Mantel’s supreme artistry is most evident: she creates suspense and apprehension where none should exist … leaving the reader with stopped breath and a sense of amazement, after closing the book, that the real world is continuing outside.’