The Crossed Keys Chronicle

Booker Prize Recent Winners

Booker Prizes

While I wait for more of the 2026 Booker Prize longlist novels I'm interested in to be released in the US, I decided to take some time to read the eventual winners of the prize from the last few years to maybe gain some insight into which book might win this year. After reading the last three winners, the only real pattern I think I've found is that the past judges really enjoy dour stories.

Let's go in reverse chronological order with Flesh by David Szalay, which was the winner for 2025. In Flesh we follow most of the life of István, who, when we meet him, is an awkward teen living in an apartment complex in Hungary. We then get to see multiple vignettes throughout his life, most of which are punctuated by either sexual transgressions or bouts of violence. As a teenager he is seduced by his older, married neighbor, whom he helps with her weekly grocery shopping. Eventually he develops feelings for her, and when he tries to continue the relationship, he confronts her husband and accidentally knocks him down the apartment building stairs, killing him. Later we learn that because he was a minor, he only spends time in a juvenile detention center for the crime. As we skip through his life, we find him as a soldier in the Iraq War, then a private bodyguard, and eventually a land developer. The only constant is that bad things seem to befall him on a fairly regular basis.

As I mentioned earlier, I think most of these winners are not exactly uplifting stories. I thought Flesh was an interesting enough story, but ultimately it was just decades of a Hungarian man being sad. Which I guess, given the Booker Prize organization's remit of English-language stories, does make it seem a little more exotic.

The next on the list was the 2024 winner, Orbital by Samantha Harvey. Out of the three books, this was by far my least favorite, despite my love of most things sci-fi or science-y. Orbital is a short novel, under 225 pages in fact, that has some slice-of-life chapters featuring the six inhabitants of the International Space Station as it orbits the Earth. There is no real overarching plot; we just learn about the lives of the astronaut/cosmonaut crew as they are going about their daily space lives. Even given its extraterrestrial setting, it's very much not a piece of genre writing. During the story they do note that a different set of astronauts have passed them on their way to a new moon mission, but that's actually something that is currently planned for our world as well, so not quite so fantastical.

Given the length and the general lack of plot, I don't have a ton more to say about Orbital. The prose is very nice, and the descriptions of the Earth, including a large typhoon they are tracking from their windows, are very evocative of being in Space, but for me, at least, there just isn't much there. Even if you do like Space, I think this is an easy book to skip.

The final book in this batch is Prophet Song by Paul Lynch. In this book our protagonist is Eilish Stack, who is a scientist and a mother living in Dublin. As the story progresses we see the horrors of what happens when a modern society descends into the throes of fascism. Eilish's family and their lives are torn apart as they refuse to go along with the new regime that has come to power in Ireland.

This was by far my favorite of the three, but it was a very difficult read to get through. Even though it was written a few years ago, the parallels to what is threatening to happen here in the US are sobering to think about. As the descent into societal madness goes on, the characters are forced to face the reality that their lives are never going to be the same again. I'll refrain from any specific spoilers, but suffice to say that, as is often the case, there are no happy endings for the characters we follow.

That wraps up my survey of the last three prize winners. The judging committee for each year is always made up of a different set of people, so it's certainly not the case that we'd expect much consistency between the years. Having not read any of the shortlists from these previous years, I can't say whether I think these are worthy winners or not, but at least two out of the three are worth your time to try out.