The Setup: Why I Did This to Myself
Look, I’m aware that “I read books so you don’t have to” is peak annoying. But when the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2025 longlist official announcement dropped in March with 16 titles, I realized I had this weird window of opportunity. Six of them were already circulating in my orbit. Six felt manageable. Six felt like a challenge I could actually complete before summer.
What I didn’t account for was how emotionally draining it would be to live inside these six different worlds back-to-back-to-back. I’m texting friends at 2 AM. I’m having feelings I didn’t know I had. I’m questioning whether certain structural choices constitute genius or self-indulgence.
This year’s longlist tells an interesting story about where women’s writing is headed. Sixty percent of the longlisted authors are either publishing their debut or second novel. That’s not accidental. The Women’s Prize saw a 25% jump in submissions compared to 2023, which means editors and agents are taking risks on new voices. That matters. That changes what you’re reading.
The Deserved Obscurity Test: What I’m Actually Evaluating
Here’s my system. I’m not ranking these by “best” in some objective sense. I’m ranking them by whether they’ll survive the next decade of literary archaeology. Will people still be reading this in 2035? Not because it won a prize or got optioned for Netflix (three of this year’s longlist titles were already optioned, by the way, a record for the prize’s 30-year history). But because the book contains something true that couldn’t be said any other way.
The judges, led by journalist Afua Hirsch, were explicit about wanting “radical formal experimentation alongside emotional devastation” as their north star. That’s a high bar. You can’t coast on either innovation or feeling alone. You need both. The book needs to break something open formally while also breaking your heart, preferably at the same time.
I’m not interested in nostalgia. Every book club I’m in has someone saying “they don’t write them like this anymore.” Okay, but also: they never really wrote them like that. Literary history is selective. My job here is to figure out which of these six books is genuinely doing something that won’t feel quaint in five years.
The Rankings: From “Interesting Failure” to “Genuinely Obsessed”
Number six is the book I respected more than I loved. It has ideas. It has craft. But it feels like it’s afraid of its own premise. There’s something mannered about the approach, like the author is constantly checking whether the reader is keeping up instead of just dragging us forward.
Number five is the one that breaks my heart to rank this low because it’s so clearly written from a place of genuine urgency. The problem is urgency without restraint. Every scene feels like it needs to be the climactic scene. By page two hundred, I’m numb.
Number four is where things get interesting. This is a book doing formal work that actually justifies itself. The structure isn’t decoration. The way the narrative fragments mirrors something about memory or trauma or the way we actually experience time. I’m not entirely sure it works, but I respect the attempt deeply. This is the book I’ll argue about at parties.
Number three is a surprise, even to me. I went in skeptical because the premise felt familiar. But the execution is so precise, so controlled, that it transforms something I’ve seen before into something that feels new. The author knows exactly what she’s doing at every moment. No wasted motion.
Number two is the book I can’t stop thinking about. The formal innovation feels organic rather than imposed. The emotional devastation doesn’t feel manipulative. It’s the kind of book that makes me want to immediately reread it to catch what I missed. The thing that keeps it from number one is that I’m not entirely sure it needed to be this long, but honestly, that might be a me problem.
Number one is the book that cracked me open. Formal experimentation and emotional core are so fused that you can’t separate them. You couldn’t tell this story any other way. The prose is doing work that most writers use plot for. It’s a small book that feels infinite.
What This Longlist Tells Us About the Moment We’re In
The numbers are interesting. Waterstones reported a 300% average sales spike for longlisted titles in the week after the announcement. That’s consistent with previous years, which means the Women’s Prize hasn’t lost its cultural momentum even as everything else in publishing feels chaotic.
But here’s what fascinated me while reading: almost none of these books are what I’d call cozy. There’s no comfort reading on this list. These are books that want to disturb you, complicate you, rearrange your understanding of something. That tracks with what the judges said about wanting radical formal experimentation. There’s a collective belief among these authors that the novel hasn’t been pushed far enough. That there’s still territory to explore.
Three of these books were already optioned for adaptation before the longlist was even announced, the highest proportion in the prize’s history. Part of me finds this thrilling and part of me finds it slightly depressing. It suggests that literary merit and film potential have become more aligned than they used to be. That publishers and producers are reading from the same playbook.
So What Now?
If you’re thinking about diving into this year’s longlist, you don’t have to read all six. You probably shouldn’t. Pick based on what kind of emotional devastation you’re capable of handling right now. Pick based on whether you want to be challenged by form or whether you want to be challenged by feeling. Neither is wrong. They’re just different ways of asking the novel to do its job.
You can browse the full selection over at Waterstones Women’s Prize collection if you want the official descriptions. Read the synopses. See what calls to you.
And honestly? I’m curious what you’d rank differently. My number one might be your number four. My “interesting failure” might be the book that changed your life. That’s kind of the whole point. Books aren’t objective. They’re only real in the reading.