Quiz: Which book from the Booker Prize 2025 longlist should you read first?

Image Source

Quiz Questions

1.
Which Booker-nominated author would you most like to recommend a book to you?
Image Source
- A.
  Rachel Kushner
- B.
  Paul Murray
- C.
  Sebastian Barry
- D.
  Elizabeth Strout
- E.
  Claire Keegan
- F.
  Zadie Smith
- G.
  Eleanor Catton
- H.
  Martin Amis
- I.
  Deborah Levy
- J.
  Arundhati Roy
- K.
  Tan Twan Eng
- L.
  Ian McEwan
- M.
  Patricia Lockwood
2.
When choosing a book, what draws you in?
Image Source
- A.
  Topical social and political themes
- B.
  Complex characters that feel familiar and believable
- C.
  An intricate plot with unexpected twists
- D.
  Rich, atmospheric settings
- E.
  A unique or experimental narrative style
3.
Which of these recent films or TV dramas have you enjoyed the most?
Image Source
- A.
  The Ballad of Wallis Island
- B.
  The Narrow Road to the Deep North
- C.
  The White Lotus
- D.
  Hot Milk
- E.
  The Brutalist
- F.
  Hacks
- G.
  The Four Seasons
- H.
  The Outrun
- I.
  Memoir of a Snail
- J.
  Get Millie Black
- K.
  Mix Tape
- L.
  The Phoenician Scheme
- M.
  Dying for Sex
4.
Long books or short books: what are you looking for in terms of length?
Image Source
- A.
  Something short and sweet
- B.
  Huge, heavy and utterly immersive
- C.
  How about a happy medium?
5.
The most interesting stories are told...
Image Source
- A.
  By the coast
- B.
  In the big city
- C.
  On the road
- D.
  In the countryside
- E.
  In a mix of diverse locations
6.
Which genre do you often gravitate towards?
Image Source
- A.
  Something with a bit of romance
- B.
  Give me historical fiction any day
- C.
  Something suspenseful
- D.
  I love a family drama
7.
What do you look for most in a work of fiction?
Image Source
- A.
  Something that feels entirely fresh
- B.
  A book to help me escape
- C.
  Sharp observations about the past
- D.
  Something relatable
8.
Do you want this book to…
Image Source
- A.
  Make your heart soar
- B.
  Teach you something new
- C.
  Leave you wanting more
- D.
  Make you cry
- E.
  Make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up
9.
Your ideal central character is…
Image Source
- A.
  Family orientated
- B.
  An outsider
- C.
  Someone resilient
- D.
  A creative type
- E.
  Harbouring a secret
- F.
  On a mission
10.
Which writing style do you lean towards?
Image Source
- A.
  Straightforward and concise
- B.
  Poetic and descriptive
- C.
  Ambitious and experimental
- D.
  Introspective and philosophical
- E.
  Intimate and confiding

Quiz Outcomes

1.
You should read: Misinterpretation by Ledia Xhoga
Image Source
In present-day New York City, an Albanian interpreter reluctantly agrees to work with Alfred, a Kosovar torture survivor, during his therapy sessions. Despite her husband’s cautions, she soon becomes entangled in her clients’ struggles: Alfred’s nightmares stir up her own buried memories, and an impulsive attempt to help a Kurdish poet leads to a risky encounter and a reckless plan. As ill-fated decisions stack up, jeopardising the nameless narrator’s marriage and mental health, she takes a spontaneous trip to reunite with her mother in Albania, where her life in the United States is put into stark relief. When she returns to face the consequences of her actions, she must question what is real and what is not.
2.
You should read: Seascraper by Benjamin Wood
Image Source
Thomas lives a slow, deliberate life with his mother in Longferry, working his grandpa’s trade as a shanker. He rises early to take his horse and cart to the grey, gloomy beach and scrape for shrimp, spending the afternoon selling his wares, trying to wash away the salt and scum, pining for Joan Wyath down the street, and rehearsing songs on his guitar. At heart, he is a folk musician, but it remains a private dream. When a striking visitor turns up, bringing the promise of Hollywood glamour, Thomas is shaken from the drudgery of his days and begins to see a different future. But how much of what the American claims is true, and how far can his inspiration carry Thomas? Haunting and timeless, this is the story of a young man hemmed in by his circumstances, striving to achieve fulfilment far beyond the world he knows.
3.
You should read: Flesh by David Szalay
Image Source
Fifteen-year-old István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. New to the town and shy, he is unfamiliar with the social rituals at school and soon becomes isolated, with his neighbour – a married woman close to his mother’s age – as his only companion. Their encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that István barely understands, and his life soon spirals out of control. As the years pass, he is carried gradually upwards on the 21st century’s tides of money and power, moving from the army to the company of London’s super-rich, with his own competing impulses for love, intimacy, status and wealth winning him unimaginable riches, until they threaten to undo him completely. Spare and penetrating, Flesh asks profound questions about what drives a life: what makes it worth living, and what breaks it.
4.
You should read: Endling by Maria Reva
Image Source
Ukraine, 2022. Yeva is a maverick scientist who scours the country’s forests and valleys, trying and failing to breed rare snails while her relatives urge her to settle down and start a family of her own. What they don’t know: Yeva already dates plenty of men – not for love, but to fund her work – entertaining Westerners who come to Ukraine on guided romance tours believing they’ll find docile brides untainted by feminism. Nastia and her sister, Solomiya, are also entangled in the booming marriage industry, posing as a hopeful bride and her translator while secretly searching for their missing mother, who vanished after years of fierce activism against the romance tours. So begins a journey of a lifetime across a country on the brink of war: three angry women, a truckful of kidnapped bachelors, and Lefty, a last-of-his-kind snail with one final shot at perpetuating his species.
5.
You should read: The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller
Image Source
December 1962, the West Country. Local doctor Eric Parry, mulling secrets, sets out on his rounds, while his pregnant wife sleeps on in the warmth of their cottage. Across the field, funny, troubled Rita Simmons is also asleep, her head full of images of a past life her husband prefers to ignore. He’s been up for hours, tending to the needs of the small dairy farm where he hoped to create a new version of himself, a project that’s already faltering. But when the ordinary cold of an English December gives way to violent blizzards, the two couples find their lives beginning to unravel. Where do you hide when you can’t leave home? And where, in a frozen world, can you run to?
6.
You should read: The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits
Image Source
What’s left when your kids grow up and leave home? When Tom Layward’s wife had an affair, he resolved to leave her as soon as his youngest daughter turned 18. Twelve years later, while driving her to Pittsburgh to start university, he remembers his pact. He is also on the run from his own health issues, and the fact that he’s been put on leave at work after students complained about the politics of his law class – something he hasn’t yet told his wife. So, after dropping Miriam off, he keeps driving, with the vague plan of visiting various people from his past - an old college friend, his ex-girlfriend, his brother, his son - on route, maybe, to his father’s grave in California. Pitch perfect, quietly exhilarating and moving, The Rest of Our Lives is a novel about family, marriage and those moments which may come to define us.
7.
You should read: Audition by Katie Kitamura
Image Source
Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young – young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day – partner, parent, creator, muse – and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately.
8.
You should read: The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai
Image Source
When Sonia and Sunny first glimpse each other on an overnight train, they are immediately captivated, yet also embarrassed by the fact that their grandparents had once tried to matchmake them, a clumsy meddling that only served to drive Sonia and Sunny apart. Sonia, an aspiring novelist who recently completed her studies in the snowy mountains of Vermont, has returned to her family in India, fearing she is haunted by a dark spell cast by an artist to whom she had once turned for intimacy and inspiration. Sunny, a struggling journalist resettled in New York City, is attempting to flee his imperious mother and the violence of his warring clan. Uncertain of their future, Sonia and Sunny embark on a search for happiness together as they confront the many alienations of our modern world. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is the sweeping tale of two young people navigating the many forces that shape their lives: country, class, race, history, and the complicated bonds that link one generation to the next. A love story, a family saga, and a rich novel of ideas, it is the most ambitious and accomplished work yet by one of our greatest novelists.
9.
You should read: Flashlight by Susan Choi
Image Source
One evening, 10-year-old Louisa and her father take a walk out on the breakwater. They are spending the summer in a coastal Japanese town while her father Serk, a Korean émigré, completes an academic secondment from his American university. When Louisa wakes hours later, she has washed up on the beach and her father is missing, probably drowned. The disappearance of Louisa’s father shatters their small family unit. As Louisa and her American mother Anne return to the US, this traumatic event reverberates across time and space, and the mystery of what really happened to Serk slowly unravels. Flashlight moves between the post-war Korean immigrant community in Japan, to suburban America, and the North Korean regime, to tell the astonishing story of one family swept up in the tides of 20th-century history.
10.
You should read: One Boat by Jonathan Buckley
Image Source
On losing her father, Teresa returns to a small town on the Greek coast – the same place she visited when grieving her mother nine years ago. She immerses herself again in the life of the town, observing the inhabitants going about their business, a quiet backdrop for her reckoning with herself. An episode from her first visit resurfaces vividly – her encounter with John, a man struggling to come to terms with the violent death of his nephew. Soon Teresa encounters some of the people she met last time around: Petros, an eccentric mechanic, whose life story may or may not be part of John’s; the beautiful Niko, a diving instructor; and Xanthe, a waitress in one of the cafés on the leafy town square. They talk about their longings, regrets, the passing of time, their sense of who they are.
11.
You should read: Universality by Natasha Brown
Image Source
‘Remember – words are your weapons, they’re your tools, your currency.’ Late one night on a Yorkshire farm, a man is brutally bludgeoned with a solid gold bar. A plucky young journalist sets out to uncover the truth surrounding the attack, connecting the dots between an amoral banker landlord, an iconoclastic columnist, and a radical anarchist movement. She solves the mystery, but her viral longread exposé raises more questions than it answers. Through a voyeuristic lens, Universality focuses on words: what we say, how we say it, and what we really mean. The follow-up novel to Natasha Brown’s Assembly is a compellingly nasty celebration of the spectacular force of language. It dares you to look away.
12.
You should read: The South by Tash Aw
Image Source
When his grandfather dies, a boy named Jay travels south with his family to the property he left them, a once flourishing farm that has fallen into disrepair. The trees are diseased, the fields parched from months of drought. Still, Jay’s father, Jack, sends him out to work the land, or whatever land is left. Over the course of these hot, dense days, Jay finds himself drawn to Chuan, the son of the farm’s manager, different from him in every way except for one. Out in the fields, and on the streets into town, the charge between the boys intensifies. Inside the house, the other family members confront their own regrets, and begin to drift apart. Like the land around them, they are powerless to resist the global forces that threaten to render their lives obsolete. At once sweeping and intimate, The South is a story of what happens when private and public lives collide. It is the first in a quartet of novels that form Tash Aw’s masterful portrait of a family navigating a period of great change – a reimagined epic for our times.
13.
You should read: Love Forms by Claire Adam
Image Source
Trinidad, 1980: Dawn Bishop, aged 16, leaves her home and journeys across the sea to Venezuela. There, she gives birth to a baby girl, and leaves her with nuns to be given up for adoption. Dawn tries to carry on with her life – a move to England, a marriage, a career, two sons, a divorce – but through it all, she still thinks of the child she had in Venezuela, and of what might have been. Then, 40 years later, a woman from an internet forum gets in touch. She says that she might be Dawn’s long-lost daughter, stirring up a complicated mix of feelings: could this be the person to give form to all the love and care Dawn has left to offer?