Beyond the Shortlist: The 2025 Booker Longlist titles worth your time • #181

In which Kate is joined by pod regular, journalist Phil Chaffee and Professor Elizabeth Eva Leach. Both read over 200 books a year, and their reading stacks this year have included the Booker longlist. 

And so who better to consider the books that didn't make the final cut – but which are, notwithstanding, the 'best' books selected from over 150 submitted titles.

As we know, really great books can get overlooked for the shortlist. Consider Trust by Hernan Diaz, longlisted but not shortlisted, or, going further back Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro and before that Penelope Fitzgerald's miraculous novel The Blue Flower. The fallibility of the judging process thus proven let's leave no stone unturned in considering this year's selection. Did the judges overlook a new favourite read?

The Booker Prize is announced on 10th November and we'll be recording an episode on the shortlist on the night. Coming soon!

Booklist

• Misinterpretation by Ledia Xhoga 

• Seascraper by Benjamin Wood

• Endling by Maria Reva

• One Boat by Jonathan Buckley

• The Outline Trilogy by Rachel Cusk

• The Rough Guide to Venice and the Veneto

• Universality by Natasha Brown

• The South by Tash Aw

• Love Forms by Claire Adam

• Barn 8 by Deb Olin Unferth

• The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai

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