From Muslim Indian women’s lives to a Danish time looper, all six contenders for the £50,000 prize are from independent presses, as translator Sophie Hughes earns an unprecedented fifth nomination

Hiromi Kawakami and Solvej Balle have made this year’s International Booker prize shortlist, which for the first time is comprised entirely of books published by independent presses.

British translator Sophie Hughes has been shortlisted for her translation of Perfection, originally written in Italian by Vincenzo Latronico . This marks the fifth time Hughes has been shortlisted for the prize, making her the award’s record holder for the most times shortlisted and longlisted.

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Kate Folk on Sky Daddy, a book about sex, death and plane crashes that’s taking off in these turbulent times

If we told our forebears that we could soar in the sky nearly seven miles above the ground, they would stare at us agog. But now air travel is one big grumble: it’s degrading, everyone is ill-mannered and you used to get free peanuts in this country, but now the peanuts are not free. Air travel, like everything else, is about the politics of resentment. The skies are feeling a lot less friendly, and that’s before you get to a year in which Americans have experienced profound tragedy in the air , as well as significant cuts to an already strained Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

In this turbulent time for flying lands Sky Daddy, the unusual debut novel by Kate Folk, a San Francisco author and screenwriter whose short story collection Out There was released in 2022. Sky Daddy is narrated by a woman called Linda who, like many of us, lives her life in dogged pursuit of love. She just wants that love to come from a commercial airplane in free fall. “I believed this was my destiny,” Linda tells us, “for a plane to recognize me as his soulmate mid-flight and, overcome with passion, relinquish his grip on the sky, hurtling us to earth in a carnage that would meld our souls for eternity.”

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A terrific second novel from the British author of Assembly examines what it means to be truthful – and who really benefits when facts come to light

Miriam Leonard, AKA Lenny, one of a tight core of characters at the heart of Natasha Brown’s terrific second novel, would probably dislike Universality intensely. Then again, she might love it, because an unpredictability of opinion is her stock in trade: a newspaper columnist who has recently sashayed from the comment pages of the Telegraph to those of the Observer , her views on class, race, sex, the economy and, latterly, the iniquity of diversity, equity and inclusion programmes are uncompromisingly held and vociferously broadcast, but only opaquely coherent. To keep moving is the trick.

Lenny is making a better fist of survival than many of those around her, with her exceptionally neat formula for wooing readers, which involves alighting on a news story and making “a lofty comparison”: “Obscure elements of European history are best, but a Russian novel or philosophical theory can be just as effective.” Certainly, she is faring better than disgraced banker Richard, cast out of his shiny-paned City office and his home in the Surrey stockbroker belt after a long read in which he has enthusiastically and, it turns out, foolhardily participated goes viral; the piece’s author, struggling freelance journalist Hannah, is briefly propelled to something approaching professional and personal respectability but finds herself similarly becalmed once the click-frenzy moves on. And neither of them would want to swap places with Jake, Lenny’s desperate and ne’er-do-well son (“a mass of wild hair, shambolic clothing and lifelong unaccountability”, she thinks grimly as she once again pushes him away), or with Pegasus, the aspiring communard whose utopian dream has irretrievably fractured.

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A new prize recognises the power of storytelling to address the biggest issue of our time

No novelist should ignore the climate emergency, Paul Murray, author of the bestselling novel The Bee Sting, told the Observer last year : “It is the unavoidable background for being alive in the 21st century.” In recognition of the vital role of literature in responding to the Anthropocene moment, this week the inaugural shortlist was announced for the Climate Fiction prize.

The five novels include Orbital by Samantha Harvey , set during one day on the International Space Station and the winner of last year’s Booker prize; time-travelling romcom The Ministry of Time from debut novelist Kaliane Bradley; eco-thriller Briefly Very Beautiful by Roz Dineen; And So I Roar , about a young girl in Nigeria, by Abi Daré; and a story of migrants in an abandoned city in Téa Obreht’s The Morningside . All the shortlisted authors are women.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here .

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He gained fame in Japan posting surreal videos of meat, veg and even ears. Then he tried writing – and soon had three bestsellers in the Top 10. As one now reaches the English-speaking world, we meet the faceless phenomenon

Hidden behind a white papier-mache mask, wearing a black bodysuit and with a voice modulated to sound something like a little girl’s, is Japan’s latest literary superstar. Almost nothing is known about Uketsu – a made-up name that means “rain hole” – who first gained fame posting surreal videos on YouTube: clips of asparagus that turns into fingers when chopped; strips of meat pegged out on a washing line; eight ears spinning on a wheel.

Then, in 2020, Uketsu posted a 21-minute mystery story based on a series of floor plans, and was told he should turn it into a novel. Since then, his books have become blockbusters in Japan: three of the country’s Top 10 fiction bestsellers last year were by him. Now the first of his novels to have been translated into English, Strange Pictures, has come out in the UK and the US, and Uketsu has agreed to speak to me about it on Zoom.

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A picaresque tale blends ghosts and ghouls with political satire and a scathing attack on corruption

Alain Mabanckou, the acclaimed Francophone-Congolese writer, repeatedly returns in his books to his childhood home, Pointe-Noire in Congo-Brazzaville, where he was born in 1966. His latest novel is no exception.

Dealing With the Dead begins as a ghost story and ends with an excoriating account of kleptocracy. Mabanckou, who studied law in Paris and currently teaches literature at the University of California, Los Angeles, clearly enjoys experimenting with styles and blends magic realism, crime, mythology and satire into the mix, while echoes of Marcel Proust and Nathaniel Hawthorne add to the tale’s rich texture.

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A very personal view of an Irish scandal; a comprehensive survey of mystical beliefs; and a dystopian sci-fi novel where humanity is on the brink

Clair Wills
Penguin, £10.99, pp208 (paperback)

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Welcome to our annual selection of the year’s finest debut novels. We have a proven track record in picking authors that go on to be loved by readers and win awards … from Douglas Stuart and Sally Rooney to Caleb Azumah Nelson and Bonnie Garmus. Here are 2025’s gems

For the 12th year running, writers and editors on the Observer New Review spent the busy weeks before Christmas immersed in dozens of forthcoming debut novels, seeking out the titles we reckon deserve to be in everyone’s hands over the months ahead. Whatever your taste in fiction, this list gives you a heads-up on the future prize winners, mega-sellers and word-of-mouth hits that change the literary conversation. From Shuggie Bain to Conversations with Friends and The Miniaturist , and from Caleb Azumah Nelson to Bonnie Garmus and Sheena Patel – all found early champions here. Colin Barrett, one of last year’s picks , just won this year’s Nero debut fiction prize , awarded last year to Michael Magee, one of our 2023 picks .

Our search for the year’s best debut novels only ever has one rule: the writers we choose must live in the UK or Ireland. After that, anything goes. The class of 2025 includes authors whose manuscripts were snapped up before they’d left university, and some who didn’t put pen to paper until a later-life left turn. Some are published by independent presses, others by cash-splashing corporates trumpeting the spoils of multiway bidding wars, television rights already in the bag. There are novels on this list that were written at dawn, through lunch breaks, whenever the nine-to-five allowed, and at least one that was written on the cushion of a six-figure advance – a pressure of its own. Several authors here are already well known for their short story collections. Nothing mattered to us but the novels themselves.

The strong showing from writers in Ireland and Northern Ireland makes sense when you hear them talk about the subsidised literary magazines and development agencies that helped them grow. Surprise, surprise: arts funding is transformative. Those kinds of fortifying networks exist in Britain too, yet the mood feels more atomised, less collegiate, not least since the White Review – a magazine that broke many new names – ceased to publish after Arts Council cuts in 2023.

If there’s a theme among this year’s books, it might be care – parent-child relationships recur in a variety of guises – but their style and subject differ as widely as their paths to publication. There’s a dizzyingly transcontinental ecological epic about Hindu nationalism, set everywhere from the Chagos Islands to the Arctic Circle. There’s a spare, slender tale of embattled gay love in 1980s south Wales. There’s a pacy page-turner about escaping coercive control, and a filthy comic romp about an “Islamic State bride” in Iraq (really). And that’s just for starters; we loved every one of these outstanding novels, and we think you will too. Here’s to yet more excellent reading.
Anthony Cummins

A lot of eco fiction is very worthy. My book has car chases!

As a teenager, sex is all-consuming … grotty but still erotic, even romantic – shenanigans in cinemas, shenanigans behind cinemas

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The writer on her third novel, Miss Austen, being turned into a TV drama, what we get wrong about the much-loved author – and why she would never write a book with her husband, Robert Harris

Former journalist Gill Hornby, 65, published her first novel in her early 50s but it wasn’t until writing her third, Miss Austen (2020), that she hit her stride. Centred on Jane Austen’s beloved older sister, Cassandra, it probes the mystery of why she destroyed hundreds of their letters, and became a bestseller praised by Janeites. Now, it’s been made into a four-part BBC drama to coincide with the 250th anniversary of Jane’s birth, with Bafta-nominated Keeley Hawes playing Cassandra. Hornby has since written two further novels set in the extended Austen family, the latest of which, The Elopement , will be released in May. She lives in Kintbury, Berkshire, with her husband, the author Robert Harris.

What’s it like seeing Miss Austen on screen?
Obviously the grammar of TV is so different, and Cassandra in the novel is much older. I don’t object to that at all and Keeley Hawes is absolutely marvellous, her performance is so clever and quiet, but the revelation is Patsy Ferran as Jane Austen. She has every quality that I don’t think has ever been shown before in a performance of Austen – that quirky awkwardness, the intelligence that shines out of her.

Miss Austen starts on BBC One on 2 February, with all episodes on iPlayer

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