Booklists, Author Visits and Interviews
Books Unlocked provides free copies of Booker Prize longlisted and shortlisted titles for participants to read, discuss and keep. We send out two lists every year for settings to choose from.
Books Unlocked Booklist 1 of 2025
This list was sent out in February/March 2025 and has 10 titles. Settings were allowed to choose two titles from this list, and up to 15 copies of each title.
Click on the book covers below to find out more from the publishers:
- Life of Pi - Yann Martel (Canongate Books)
- On Beauty - Zadie Smith (Penguin - Hamish Hamilton)
- James - Percival Everett (Picador/Pan Macmillan)
- Hotel World - Ali Smith (Penguin Random House)
- Home Fire - Kamila Shamsie (Bloomsbury)
- This Other Eden - Paul Harding (Penguin - Hutchinson Heinemann)
- Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha - Roddy Doyle (Penguin - Secker & Warburg)
- Atonement - Ian McEwan (Penguin)
- Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies - Maddie Mortimer (Pan Macmillan)
- The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst (Pan Macmillan)
Buy the list and support our work
We've pulled together the titles for this year's Books Unlocked list ready for you to browse and buy on Bookshop.org - an online bookshop with a mission to financially support local, independent bookshops and charities.
Author Visits
Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow visited HMP East Sutton Park to discuss her book All the Little Bird-Hearts, longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize, with the residents there. This was a fantastic event, where the novel prompted discussions around relationships, vulnerability and motherhood, and particularly how autism can complicate these.
National Prison Radio Interviews
Within our partnership with NPR, where Booker Prize novels are serialized in their 11pm slot, we also organize author interviews to explore the book further. The interview is recorded by NPR and then aired to roughly 80,000 people in custody across the UK. The latest interview was with Jonathan Escoffery, the author of If I Survive You.