The shortlist of the 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction was announced on Wednesday, 3 April. The winner will be announced on June 12. The winning author will receive a cash prize of £30,000 and the “Bessie”, a bronze statuette created by the artist Grizel Niven.

The prize was established in 1996, and is awarded annually to the author of the best full-length novel of the year written in English and published in the UK. The judging panel for the 2025 Prize is chaired by author Kit de Waal. She is joined by novelist Diana Evans; author Bryony Gordon; magazine editor Deborah Joseph; and musician Amelia Warner.

Here are the six shortlisted novels and their opening lines:

Good Girl, Aria Aber

The train back to Berlin took seven hours, and the towel in my suitcase was still wet from my last swim in the lake, dampening the pages of my favorite books. I took the S-Bahn and then the U-Bahn home to Lipschitzallee and walked past the discount supermarket, the old pharmacy, and the Qurbani Bakery with the orange shop cat lounging outside its door. In our building’s elevator, an intimate odor assaulted my nostrils: urine mixed with ash. Hello, spider, I said, looking at the cobweb in the corner. The ceiling lamp twitched, turning alien the swastika graffiti. My key, fastened by a pink ribbon, turned in the old lock. Nobody was home. I kicked off my shoes. The cat meowed for food, its dander floating in the air. My room was merely all it had been for so many years: a suffocating box with a tiny window, pink sheets, and that Goethe quote I’d painted in golden letters above my desk. The popcorn ceiling seemed lower than before. I wiped the kitchen counters, walked into my parents’ bedroom, opened their closet, and pulled out my mother’s cashmere frock. Maybe I cried, maybe I didn’t. What I did was lie in bed and sleep until dark, covering my face with her dress.

It’s been over a decade now, but the colors of that summer day are as precise as yesterday: I was eighteen when I returned from boarding school, and my sense of melancholy was even more overwhelming than I anticipated. My cousins called me pretentious. The Arab boys who loitered outside the shisha bar sneered at me. You changed, they said, meaning my relative lack of vernacular and my newfound obsession with eyeliner.

Back then, I still wanted to be a photographer, a small Olympus point-and-shoot knocking around in my backpack. In my first days back, Berlin bloomed at the seams with rotten garbage. Ants crawled out of the sockets in my father's living room, a small street of them always leading up the wall and out the window; no matter how much poison we sprayed into the electrical outlets or taped them shut – they just returned. And though prophesied to soon be extinct, the bees were also everywhere. They covered the overflowing trash cans in the city, or you'd see them lazily dozing on outdoor cafe tables, where they fattened themselves on crumbs of sugar or lay unconscious next to jars of cherry jam. I brushed the dirt out of my hair and rinsed it from my face and all I could hear, even in the early morning, was the howling of sirens over the frenzied songs of birds, which chirped and chirped and chirped.

Published by Bloomsbury.

All Fours, Miranda July

Sorry to trouble you was how the note began, which is such a great opener. Please, trouble me! Trouble me! I’ve been waiting my whole life to be troubled by a note like this.

Sorry to trouble you but it looked like someone was using a telephoto lens to take pictures through your windows from the street. If it was someone you know, then sorry for the misunderstanding, if not, though, I got the make/model/license of their vehicle.

Brian (from next door)
and his phone number

You don’t really need a telephoto lens because we have giant windows in front with no curtains. Sometimes I pause before coming inside and watch Harris and Sam innocently going about their business. Harris mutely explaining something to Sam, or lifting Sam into the air. I feel such tenderness toward them. Try to remember this feeling, I say to myself. They are the same people up close as they are from here.

We all immediately knew which neighbor Brian was. The FBI neighbor. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from Brian it’s that being in the FBI is not a secret like the CIA. He wears his (bulletproof?) FBI vest with the letters FBI on it way more than could possibly be required. It’s like if someone on the Dodgers wore his uniform to water the lawn. All the neighbors would be like, We get it, dude, you’re on the Dodgers.

So the first thing Harris did after I read the note aloud was scoff that of course the FBI neighbor had “caught” someone with a “telephoto lens.” And the second thing Harris did was nothing. He was busy and didn’t think it was worth pursuing.

“It’s a little creepy, though, right?”

“People take pictures of everything these days,” he said, walking out of the room.

“Do you think I should call him, though?”

But Harris didn’t hear me.

Published by Canongate Books

The Persians, Sanam Mahloudji

For a week it was a nonstop party of drugs and cartoons until an hour ago when I bailed my Auntie Shirin out of the Aspen jail after her arrest for attempted prostitution.

In the white Suburban taxi that bulldozed across the uneven snowy roads, she poked her head out the backseat window, avoiding my questions. Finally, she turned around, her cheeks pink and alive, and yelled in Persian for me to stop meddling: “Foozooli nakon!”

Back at our hotel, Auntie Shirin marched down the third-floor hallway in her five-inch-heel over-the-knee boots. She passed 3E without slowing down. “Not dealing with Houman’s kumbaya shit. Bita, my dear, my joon, I’m staying with you.”

I hovered the key card over the lock, and my door opened.

Thirty minutes later she walked out of my bathroom wearing a big white hotel robe, and a towel around her head. The steam rolling out the door smelled of sweet chemicals.

Shirin removed the towel and shook out her hair. She lay face down on the king bed, on top of the cloudlike duvet. We’d dubbed my room Club 3M. Me, her son Mo, and all the dipshit kids of our parents’ friends. They made mine the party room not because I was the life of the party but more the opposite – after Mom died last year we’d skipped the trip and could I really get into the spirit without a shove? For eleven years straight, since 1994, our friends and family had flown to Aspen from New York, LA, and Houston, as if 1979 and the Islamic Revolution hadn’t happened. As if we were still the most important families in Iran, descended from the great ancient lines, although this was America and nobody cared. The locals hated us. Not openly, but they did. I imagined them like that Pace Picante commercial, cowboys mumbling “Get a rope” when they saw us in all black, buying a thousand dollars’ worth of caviar and champagne at the mom-and-pop market.

Published by Fourth Estate/HarperCollins.

Tell Me Everything, Elizabeth Strout

This is the story of Bob Burgess, a tall, heavyset man who lives in the town of Crosby, Maine, and he is sixty-five years old at the time that we are speaking of him. Bob has a big heart, but he does not know that about himself; like many of us, he does not know himself as well as he assumes to, and he would never believe he had anything worthy in his life to document. But he does; we all do.

Autumn comes early to Maine.

By the second or third week in August a person driving in a car might glance up and see in the distance the top of a tree that has become red. In Crosby, Maine, this year it happened first with the large maple tree by the church, and yet it was not even midway through the month of August. But the tree began to change color on its side facing east. This was curious to those who had lived there for years, they could not remember that being the first tree to change colour. By the end of August, the entire tree was not red but a slightly orange-yellow thing, to be seen as you turned the corner onto Main Street. And then September followed, the summer people went back to where they had come from, and the streets of Crosby often had only a few people walking down them. The leaves did not seem vibrant, overall, and people speculated that this was because of the lack of rainfall that August – and September – had endured.

Published by Penguin Random House.

The Safekeep, Yael van der Wouden

Isabel found a broken piece of ceramic under the roots of a dead gourd.

Spring had brought a shock of frost, a week of wet snow, and now – at the lip of summer – the vegetable garden was shrinking into itself. The beans, the radishes, the cauliflower: browned and rotting. Isabel was on her knees, gloved hands and a stringed hat, removing the dying things. The shard nicked through her glove, pierced a little hole.

It wasn’t a wound and it didn’t bleed. Isabel took off her glove and stretched the skin of her palm tight, looking for a puncture. There was none, only a sting of pain that left quickly.

Back at the house she washed the piece and held it in watery hands. Blue flowers along the inch of a rim, the suggestion of a hare’s leg where the crockery had broken. It had once been a plate, which was part of a set – her mother’s favourite: the good chinaware, for holidays, for guests. When Mother was alive the set was kept in a glass vitrine in the dining room and no one was allowed to handle it. It had been years since her passing and the plates were still kept behind the closed doors, unused. On the rare occasion when Isabel’s brothers visited, Isabel would set the table using everyday plates and Hendrik would try to pry open the vitrine and say, “Isa, Isa, come now, what’s the point of having good things if you can’t touch them?” And Isabel would answer: “They are not for touching. They are for keeping.”

There was no explanation for the broken piece, for where it had come from and why it had been buried. None of Mother’s plates had ever gone missing.

Isabel knew this and still she checked now. The set was as it had been left: a deck of plates, bowls, a little milk jug. In the middle of each one – three hares, chasing one another in a circle.

Published by Penguin Random House.

Fundamentally, Nussaibah Younis

It wasn’t ideal, navigating the Zagros Mountains on a freezing September night, wearing a trouser suit and ballet flats. The cracked corpse of a river marked the way through the Iraqi-Turkish border.

My handbag slipped off my shoulder as I struggled over uneven ground. I gripped it close with one hand, my other arm outstretched, grasping balance out of the hazy mist.

It had been a thrill, six months ago, buying a designer bag for the UN job. I’d studied the handbags like museum pieces on their back-lit pedestals before selecting a buttery mauve tote, holding my breath when I tapped my credit card.

I’ve since revised my definition of thrilling.

As I stepped onto a rock, it disintegrated into a spray of gravel and I fell, cutting my palms on stones. I turned over, my back against the dirt, the black heavens enormous overhead, covered in millions of tiny stars. The spectre of an omniscient God strengthens in moments like this. If you exist, I silently prayed, do me a favour and take it down a notch?

“You is fine, Nadia?” shouted Darban. Twenty metres further up, his black silhouette was cut out of the sky. The outline of a stiff kaftan, baggy pants and turban: the traditional dress of Kurdish freedom fighters turned profiteers.

“I’m OK,” I said.

I looked down the valley at my burden. She rose through the gloom like an apparition, cloaked in a black abaya and headscarf, that bundle tied to her back.

“How you getting on, Sara?” I called out. The frigid breeze spun my words into echoes that reverberated from the stony surrounds. She paused mid-clamber.

“Bruv,” she said into the dark route between us, “you should’ve got an ISIS smuggler. Man’s got us on fucking Everest!”

“Are you dense?” I levered myself back to standing. “An ISIS smuggler would have shot me in the face and recruited you again.”

“They’re sick smugglers though, you gotta admit.” She hoisted the bundle higher up her back.

“I swear to God, Sara, if you stay a fucking fundy after all this, I’ll sell you into sex slavery myself!”

Her laughter filled the night air. That’s the kind of thing she finds funny. It’s one of the reasons I love her.

It does not justify what I have done.

Published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.