The Rest of Our Lives: Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025

One of the most impressive aspects of this novel is the protagonist’s voice, with his blurry unreliability hovering on the edges of his world-view. And Markovits is an assured prose stylist with a great ear for dialogue: his sentences are devastatingly acute and sometimes very funny.

Markovits’s 12th novel depicts a middle-aged couple whose relationship is on the brink, leading the husband to set off on a solo road-trip. Fluently written and effortlessly wise about the difficulties of marriage, it owes much to both Updike and Ford.

The liveliest read on this year’s Booker shortlist is a first-person, self-conscious and introspective account that often brings to mind Tom’s own admission that “at some level everything you feel or think is a kind of taking sides”

The very best of traditional literary fiction: story, dialogue, characters all directed toward the reader’s pleasure and understanding of a man who drives away from his life and tries to work out what the hell is going on.

Fluently written and effortlessly wise about families and middle age, it tells a compelling story that packs a serious emotional punch.

Irresistible ... a book that has everything — a clear line of plot, turbulently interesting narrator, themes both modern and timeless. One of those books that, as you read, makes you think, "Why aren't all novels like this?”