Everything you need to know about the International Booker Prize 2025 shortlist

The 2025 shortlist for the International Booker Prize, the world’s most influential award for translated fiction, has been announced. Here, we take a closer look at the six remarkable books, the stories behind them, their common themes and their many differences.   

The books shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025 are:   

• On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle, translated from Danish by Barbara J. Haveland  
• Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix, translated from French by Helen Stevenson 
• Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from Japanese by Asa Yoneda  
• Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated from Italian by Sophie Hughes   
• Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi  
• A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre, translated from French by Mark Hutchinson  

From the too-perfect interiors of a Berlin apartment to a terrifying journey across the English Channel; from patriarchal communities in southern India to a futuristic world at the limits of our imagination; the six shortlisted books place a huge variety of human experiences under the microscope.  

Though newly published in English, there are books here that were decades in the making – some of the stories collected in Heart Lamp were first published in the 1990s; Solvej Balle came up with the idea for On the Calculation of Volume in the 1980s; A Leopard-Skin Hat is inspired by a life-long relationship between the author and her sister.  

These are books about survival and self-preservation – about our indomitable instinct to keep going in the face of catastrophe, oppression, extinction or hopelessness. In a world that can often seem full of despair, this is a shortlist that celebrates the human spirit – our capacity to endure and our impulse to live a better life. 

What are the books about? 

In Solvej Balle‘s On the Calculation of Volume I, an antiquarian bookseller is trapped in a time loop, waking up each morning to find it’s always the 18th of November, day after day. The first part of a septology, the original Danish edition was self-published – translation rights have now been sold in over 20 countries. The Washington Post concluded: ‘If Samuel Beckett had written Groundhog Day it might read something like On the Calculation of Volume’.  

Vincent Delecroix’s Small Boat takes the true story of a group of migrants’ tragic attempt to cross the English Channel in a dinghy in 2021, which resulted in the deaths of 27 of those on board, and turns it into a shocking modern morality tale. It’s told largely from the point of view of a woman working for the French coastguard, who received – but rejected – the migrants’ desperate calls for help, and must now explain her actions to the authorities.  

In Hiromi Kawakami’s Under the Eye of the Big Bird, humans in the far-distant future find themselves on the edge of extinction – children are made in factories, while adults are watched over by AI beings known as Mothers. Leaping back and forth across thousands of years, the book asks bold questions about humanity’s strengths and flaws, and our collective resilience in the face of devastation.  

Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection follows an expat millennial couple attempting to live their dream in Berlin, but finding themselves ground down by the inevitable disappointment of the modern world and the warped reality of social media. Anna and Tom are committed to their digital lives, and feel at home among the meticulously curated food and furniture photos they and their friends share daily, but gradually struggle to find meaning in their superficial existence.  

Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq – an activist and lawyer – vividly captures the extraordinary everyday lives of marginalised Muslim women and girls in southern India, in 12 witty, vivid and heartbreaking stories, which were originally published between 1990 and 2023. Each of Mushtaq’s memorable characters – feisty daughters, audacious grandmothers, selfless mothers – are fighting to survive and thrive in a society where the odds are stacked firmly against them. 

A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre captures the love and despair of an intense platonic friendship between the Narrator and his best friend from childhood, Fanny, who suffers from severe psychological problems. Through a series of fragments of memory that skip back and forth in time, the Narrator struggles to capture the essence of the enigmatic, contradictory Fanny, who always seems to remain just out of reach. Deeply moving, the book was written in the aftermath of the death of Anne Serre’s younger sister.   

What have critics said about the shortlisted books? 

On the Calculation of Volume I 

‘On the Calculation of Volume’s premise could, in other hands, be reduced to a gimmick. But in Haveland’s rendering, Balle’s stripped-down prose has an understated clarity that lends philosophical resonance to this fantastical setup.’ – Rhian Sasseen, The Atlantic 

Small Boat 

‘Delecroix is both a novelist and a Kierkegaard expert: both pursuits lend themselves to the imagination of ethics at crisis point. Think of Small Boat as a philosophical ghost story.’ – Cal Revely-Calder, The Telegraph 

Under the Eye of the Big Bird 

‘As its queasily childlike and affectless voice – marvellously captured by translator Asa Yoneda – suggests, the novel’s real concern is not with the particularities of the worlds it depicts, but with the ways in which human nature and society shift and alter as our bodies and minds change.’ – James Bradley, The Guardian 

Perfection 

‘This chronicle of contemporary Berlin is strongest in its articulation of how a certain kind of globalisation dislocates us from our surroundings. Anna and Tom’s actions, plainly stated, devastatingly illustrate a homogenisation shown to colonise minds and bodies as much as cities.’ – Thomas McMullan, The Guardian 

Heart Lamp 

‘In each story, Mushtaq builds the tension before it becomes unbearable for her characters and readers. The women are aware that there’s something missing in their lives, though they are not fully aware of the extent of their subjugation.’ – Sayari Debnath, Scroll.in 

A Leopard-Skin Hat 

‘The story of Fanny and the Narrator is a story about our impulse to understand one another and about the way in which unknowability is what makes someone interesting; it is about, in fact, the relationship between unknowability and the desire to know, neither existing without the other.’ – Meghan Racklin, The Brooklyn Rail