Andrew Miller is the bookmakers’ favourite to win the 2025 Booker prize, which will be announced on Monday evening in London.

The English author tops the William Hill odds at 6/4 for The Land in Winter, a novel set in 1960s England which follows two marriages struggling under the weight of postwar class divisions, professional dislocation and emotional estrangement. Miller was previously shortlisted for the Booker in 2001 for his novel Oxygen.

Kiran Desai is Miller’s closest rival at 2/1 for The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, the Indian author’s first novel in almost two decades. The nearly 700-page book traces the lives of two young Indians as they navigate life in the US around the turn of the millennium. It is Desai’s third novel and her first since The Inheritance of Loss, which won her the Booker prize in 2006. If she wins again, Desai would become the fifth author to claim the prize twice, joining JM Coetzee, Peter Carey, Margaret Atwood and Hilary Mantel.

Hungarian-British writer David Szalay has also seen a late surge in betting, with Flesh shortening to 9/4 from 4/1 in recent days. Set between Hungary and London, the novel charts one man’s rags to riches story across several decades.

The rest of the shortlist includes Susan Choi’s Flashlight, a sprawling family saga; Katie Kitamura’s psychological study Audition; and Ben Markovits’s The Rest of Our Lives, a midlife road-trip novel.

“This year’s Booker prize remains an open race ahead of Monday’s announcement, with Andrew Miller edging Kiran Desai as the favourite at 6/4,” said William Hill spokesperson Lee Phelps. “The 2006 winner Desai is only just behind Miller’s The Land in Winter; we go 2/1 that she picks up another Booker prize almost 20 years on from her first scoop with The Inheritance of Loss. This year’s field is looking remarkably tight, with little to split the six contenders.”

Founded in 1969, the Booker prize is awarded annually for the best original novel written in English and published in the UK or Ireland. The winner receives £50,000, and the prize is renowned for boosting the international profile and sales of its recipients.

Previous winners include Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Ian McEwan and, most recently, Samantha Harvey, who took the 2024 award for her space-station novel Orbital.

A total of 153 novels were submitted for this year’s award, judged by a panel chaired by Irish writer Roddy Doyle and featuring actor Sarah Jessica Parker along with the writers Chris Power, Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ and Kiley Reid.