The International Booker Prize 2025

"The story of an intense friendship between the narrator and his close childhood friend, Fanny, who suffers from profound psychological disorders... Hailed in Le Point as a ‘masterpiece of simplicity, emotion and elegance’, A Leopard-Skin Hat may be Anne Serre’s most moving novel yet."

"In 12 stories, Banu Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India... Published originally in the Kannada language between 1990 and 2023, praised for their dry and gentle humour, these portraits of family and community tensions testify to Mushtaq’s years as a journalist and lawyer, in which she tirelessly championed women’s rights and protested all forms of caste and religious oppression."

"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."

"An inventive and immersive speculative novel about a future in which humans are nearing extinction... Unfolding over geological eons, Under the Eye of the Big Bird is at once an astonishing vision of the end of our species as we know it and a meditation on the qualities that, for better and worse, make us human."

"In the first part of Solvej Balle’s epic septology, Tara Selter has slipped out of time. Every morning, she wakes up to the 18th of November."

"Written by the first disabled author to win Japan’s most prestigious literary award and acclaimed instantly as one of the most important Japanese novels of the 21st century, Hunchback is an extraordinary, thrilling glimpse into the desire and darkness of a woman placed at humanity’s edge."

"Spare yet evocative, intensely intelligent in its interplay of perspectives, The Book of Disappearance – which was critically acclaimed in its original Arabic edition – is an unforgettable glimpse into contemporary Palestine as it grapples with both the memory of loss and the loss of memory."

"A jaded writer takes his spiky mother and her ill-gotten wealth on a road trip in this tragicomic and absurd semi-autobiographical novel... Eurotrash is a bitterly funny, vertiginous mirror-cabinet of familial and historical reckoning. The pair’s tragicomic quest is punctuated by the tenderness and spite meted out between two people who cannot escape one another. Intensely personal and unsparingly critical, Eurotrash is a disorientingly brilliant novel by a writer at the pinnacle of his powers."

"In the linked stories of Reservoir Bitches, 13 Mexican women prod the bitch that is Life as they fight, sew, cheat, cry and lie their way through their tangled circumstances... At once social critique and black comedy, Reservoir Bitches is a raucous debut from one of Mexico’s most thrilling new writers."

"Solenoid submerges us in the mundane details of a diarist's life, and then spirals into a bizarre, existential account of history, philosophy and mathematics... Grounded in the reality of communist Romania, the novel grapples with frightening health care, the absurdities of the education system and the struggles of family life, while investigating other universes and forking paths."