Why you should read the International Booker Prize 2025 shortlist, according to our judges

The six books on the shortlist have been chosen by the 2025 judging panel: bestselling Booker Prize-longlisted author Max Porter; prize-winning poet, director and photographer Caleb Femi; writer and Publishing Director of Wasafiri Sana Goyal; author and International Booker Prize-shortlisted translator Anton Hur; and award-winning singer-songwriter Beth Orton. The selection celebrates the best works of long-form fiction or collections of short stories translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between 1 May 2024 and 30 April 2025, as judged by the 2025 panel. The judges have whittled down their shortlist from a longlist of 13, selected from 154 books submitted by publishers – the highest number since the prize was launched in its current format in 2016. 

Max Porter says: 

‘This shortlist is the result of a life-enhancing conversation between myself and my fellow judges. Reading 154 books in six months made us feel like high-speed Question Machines hurtling through space. Our selected six awakened an appetite in us to question the world around us: How am I seeing or being seen? How are we translating each other, all the time? How are we trapped in our bodies, in our circumstances, in time, and what are our options for freedom? Who has a voice? In discussing these books we have been considering again and again what it means to be a human being now.     

‘This list is our celebration of fiction in translation as a vehicle for pressing and surprising conversations about humanity. These mind-expanding books ask what might be in store for us, or how we might mourn, worship or survive. They offer knotty, sometimes pessimistic, sometimes radically hopeful answers to these questions. Taken together they build a miraculous lens through which to view human experience, both the truly disturbing and the achingly beautiful. They are each highly specific windows into a world, but they are all gorgeously universal.   

‘We haven’t chosen these six books because we are book experts that think people need to be told what to read. We have chosen them because we need them, we found them, and we love them. We need literature that shocks, delights and baffles and reveals how weird many of us feel about the way we are living now. Ultimately, these books widen the view. They enhance the quality of conversation we are all having. They don’t shut down debate, they generate it. They don’t have all the answers, but they ask extraordinary questions.’   

Here’s what the judges had to say about the six individual books on the shortlist. 

Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix, translated by Helen Stevenson 

How would you summarise this book in a sentence to encourage readers to pick it up?  

A brilliantly unflinching use of literature to ask the most uncomfortable but urgent question of our time: to what extent are we all complicit?  

Is there something unique about this book, something that you haven’t encountered in fiction before?  

This book doesn’t just set up a complex fictional situation to illuminate the greatest human crisis of our time, it puts us inside it. It shows us how it is already inside us, in our language, our feelings, our relationships to news, politics and each other.  

What do you think it is about this book that readers will not only admire, but really love?  

It has the power to fundamentally change the way we see the world. Readers love being changed! That’s why we read.  

Can you tell us about any particular characters that readers might connect with, and why?  

The genius of this book is the way we are revolted by the protagonist, then feel for her, then fear we can no longer deny the many ways we have become her.  

Although it’s a work of fiction, is there anything about it that’s especially relevant to issues we’re confronting in today’s world?  

This book unapologetically confronts the greatest moral question of our time: the collective responsibility of those in a place of safety to those who seek it. It is the literary antidote to tabloid ignorance, hatred and xenophobia.  

Is there one specific moment in the book that has stuck in your mind and, if so, why? 

The central section of the book, which describes a (real-life) tragedy in the Channel, is one of the most devastating and affecting sections of any book.  

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated by Sophie Hughes

How would you summarise this book in a sentence to encourage readers to pick it up?  

A pitch-perfect and profound account of the existential malaise of millennial life.  

Is there something unique about this book, something that you haven’t encountered in fiction before?  

This book really infects you, but without any of the usual techniques of a novel. It eschews traditional storytelling techniques in place of an almost clinical or sociological deep-dive into the trappings of contemporary life.   

What do you think it is about this book that readers will not only admire, but really love?  

Perfection alters the reader, traps them, revolts them, intrigues them, and ultimately moves them to ask serious questions about themselves.  

Can you tell us about any particular characters that readers might connect with, and why?  

The internet is the stand-out character in this book. How has it got its teeth into us? How are we all performing versions of ourselves online, and what does that mean for the embodied self, in the so-called real world? 

Although it’s a work of fiction, is there anything about it that’s especially relevant to issues we’re confronting in today’s world?  

It’s a lean and agonisingly well-observed catalogue of contemporary concerns, from late capitalist enslavement to modern love, from soft furnishings on Instagram to the metaphysics of Western guilt.  

Is there one specific moment in the book that has stuck in your mind and, if so, why? 

There is an unforgettable moment when the young couple pack up their apartment and hide all evidence of their real lives, to fake the space into being rentable for others like them to come and briefly live a not-real life. 

A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre, translated by Mark Hutchinson 

How would you summarise this book in a sentence to encourage readers to pick it up?  

In short chapters, the Narrator attempts to put into words the teeming life and tragic death of his childhood friend, Fanny. It’s a masterful lesson in how we remember and retell the lives of those bound up with our own, how we sieve and distil memories and fictions of the mind into true feelings.  

Is there something unique about this book, something that you haven’t encountered in fiction before?  

There have been some great novels about friendship, but the duty of care with which one remembers and writes a life really struck us and stayed with us. The book is both a celebration of life and an elegy — holding the fragility of life and death in its hands with the utmost care. With incredible insight, invention and dignity it sensitively captures the open wound with which the death of a loved one leaves us.  

What do you think it is about this book that readers will not only admire, but really love?  

We loved how it experimented with – and expanded – the possibilities of the novel form. Where do we draw the lines between life and fiction? How can we reinvent the contemporary novel form through our reading of it? This novel invites readers to work and to play — what’s not to love about that?   

Can you tell us about any particular characters that readers might connect with, and why?  

Without giving too much away, the book does not feature your classic, typical narrator. We’ll leave you with this to ponder on: ‘A Narrator is just like everyone else, the only difference being that he tells stories; he has none of the extraordinary powers people ascribe to him …’  

Although it’s a work of fiction, is there anything about it that’s especially relevant to issues we’re confronting in today’s world?  

Written in the aftermath of the death of Serre’s sister, this novel attempts to cup the elusive, slippery nature of grief. Although it tackles personal loss and mental illness, there’s a sense in which, with the reader’s engagement, the grief becomes ours. It becomes communal and shared. As we grieve the loss of our collective humanity, this book offers hope and helps us feel less alone in the world.  

Is there one specific moment in the book that has stuck in your mind and, if so, why? 

‘When Fanny was present, the sky was the sky, the earth earth; with one fell blow, her bracing brutality would separate out the elements, restoring objects and people to their rightful places and adjusting the rules of perspective. Perhaps he’ll just have to keep his friend inside him …’ 

Ah! What a pleasure and privilege it is to have someone adjust our perspective, to be able to hold someone inside ourselves. Which of us can truly say that another human being has moved and changed us so deeply and fully?