The 2025 Longlist

The Longlist for the sixteenth Walter Scott Prize was announced on 18th February.  Here is more information on each of the twelve books; please follow us on social media for exclusive author interviews, videos and book giveaways!

THE HEART IN WINTER Kevin Barry (Canongate)

1890s Montana and as a hard winter approaches, the city of Butte bustles with immigrant Irish workers seeking wealth in the copper mines.  Tom Rourke, a poet, is no different from all the other degenerate hard-livers, until Polly Gillespie arrives as the new bride of devout mine captain Long Anthony Harrington.  As Polly and Tom’s love affair burns, they steal a horse and ride out west, through Montana and Idaho, before they are hotly pursued by a posse of Cornish gunsmen who will stop at nothing to catch the runaway lovers.

THE CATCHERS Xan Brooks (Salt)

Set against the backdrop of the 1927 Mississippi flood, The Catchers explores some of the most painful episodes of African American history via two main characters, John Coughlin and Moss Evans. Through the dual narratives of the so-called ‘song-catchers’ like Coughlin, who trawl for hill country music to sell to record companies, and the poor, exploited musicians like Moss Evans – subsistence farmers, or labourers, who make the music in the hope of bagging their measly financial share if the song is a ‘firefly’ hit – Brooks builds a picture of the politics of race, mirrored in the natural disaster engulfing the state.

MOTHER NAKED Glen James Brown (Peninsula Press)

Durham, 1434, and an aging minstrel arrives at court to entertain the most powerful men in the city.  This is Modyr Nakett, or Mother Naked, as immortalised in Durham Cathedral’s rolls as receiving a single payment, the lowest payment to a performer ever made amongst 200 years of records.  The legend he’s come to tell is that of Fell Wraith, the ‘walking ghost’ who is said to have slaughtered the people of the local village of Segerston forty years before.  But is the myth just that, or do the murders have their roots in the stories of those fated to a lifetime of labour?  Mother Naked is a tale told from the margins of society, with the Black Death and the Peasants’ Revolt looming large in the background.

CLEAR Carys Davies (Granta)

Desperate for money after breaking away to help found the Free Church of Scotland in 1843, rebel minister John Ferguson agrees to assist a landowner’s factor who is engaged in the final throes of the Highland Clearances. Ferguson will travel to a nameless island halfway to Norway, at the farthest reaches of the landowner’s estate, to survey the land and ensure that Ivar — the last remaining inhabitant, who speaks neither English or Scots — is evicted. The Factor gives Ferguson an introduction to a schoolmaster with a few words of Ivar’s language, some basic supplies and a pistol. The boat will return in one month to collect him.  But when Ferguson falls from a cliff and is rescued by Ivar, slowly, as the minister regains his strength, the two men form a bond.

THE MARE Angharad Hampshire (Northodox Press)

Hermine Braunsteiner lived most of her life in the US as a loving New York suburban housewife, valued friend and neighbour.  But when a New York Times journalist knocked on their door, the couple’s life was blown apart.  Braunsteiner had been one of only a few thousand female guards in the Nazi concentration camps, nicknamed ‘the Mare’ by prisoners because of her habit of kicking inmates to death.  When the camps were liberated, she had managed to flee to Vienna and subsequently met and married an American holidaying in Austria.  How could a seemingly ordinary woman have descended into such evil? And why did her husband stay with her even after he learned of her past?  Hampshire’s fictionalised retelling explores the roles of propaganda, fear, ideology and cognitive dissonance in the story of the first person to be extradited from the US for Nazi war crimes.

THE BOOK OF DAYS Francesca Kay (Swift Press)

Narrator Alice has lost one child and is married to the aging, sclerotic – slowly dying – lord of the manor,who lost his first wife in childbirth and all but one of his other children. He has ordered the building of a chantry chapel in the local church, the creation of which will destroy shrines to saints that are important to the villagers.  But the chapel itself is doomed anyway, because this is 1546, and on the march are those Anglican reformists enforcing the ban on prayers for the dead.  Paced through the passing of saints’ days that are soon to be abolished in the Reformation that remains nameless throughout, the novel grounds itself in the turning of the seasons and the natural world, which stands firm as the religious world continues to change relentlessly alongside.

THE FIRST FRIEND Malcolm Knox (Allen & Unwin Aus)

In this chilling black satirical comedy set in Stalin’s Soviet Union of 1938, Knox imagines the real life  gangster mob in charge of a global superpower, as ‘The Boss’, Lavrentiy Beria, prepares a Black Sea resort for a visit from ‘The Boss of Bosses’, fellow Georgian Josef Stalin.  By Beria’s side as pressure builds on him, from enemies and allies alike, is childhood friend Vasil Murtov – after all, even the worst person has a best friend. But Murtov has a family to protect, too, and must play his own thrilling survival game in the shadow of the increasingly paranoid and unstable threat that is Beria and the monstrous society he has spawned.

GLORIOUS EXPLOITS Ferdia Lennon (Fig Tree)

Sicily, 412 BC, and thousands of defeated Athenians are imprisoned in the quarries of Syracuse, seemingly destined to die of starvation in the scorching heat.  Enter stage left Sicilians Gelon – a visionary, dreamer and theatre lover – and Lampo, who is jobless, heartbroken and in need of some distraction.  Despite their frailty, the captured Athenians can still recite lines from Greek tragedies, and as they’re tempted by Gelon and Lampo with wine and scraps of food, the rather unorthodox staging of one of Euripides’s greatest tragedies begins, with Ferdia Lennon’s reimagining inspired by a reference in Plutarch’s Lives, and exploring the healing power of art.  After all, you can hate the invaders but still love their poetry.

A SIGN OF HER OWN Sarah Marsh (Tinder Press)

1876, the United States on the eve of their centennial, and the soon-to-be-married Ellen Lark receives an unexpected visit from Alexander Graham Bell.  She knows immediately what he wants from her. Ellen is deaf – like debut novelist Sarah Marsh herself — and was, in her younger years, a student of Bell’s in a technique called Visible Speech. During their time together, Bell also confided in Ellen about his dream of producing a device which would transmit the human voice along a wire: the telephone. Now Bell’s claim to the patent on the telephone is being challenged by his rivals, standing in the way of the wealth and fame that Bell craves, and he needs Ellen to speak up.  But Ellen has a different story to tell: of how Bell betrayed her, and other deaf pupils, in the name of ambition and personal gain; and of how he cut Ellen off from a community in which she had come to feel truly at home.  Ellen knows she must tell her story, but those around her would rather she retain her silence.

THE LAND IN WINTER Andrew Miller (Sceptre)

It is the winter of 1962 in the West Country, and in an old asylum, a young man opens a bottle of sleeping pills in the dark.  Close by, two couples begin their day: local doctor Eric Parry gets an early start on his rounds while his pregnant wife sleeps on; and, over the fields, Rita sleeps on in her cold farmhouse, dreaming of her past life, as her husband – trying to forget any past life — tends to the dairy farm he has bought in an effort to reinvent himself.  The two marriages are wildly different, each is loving in its own way.  But when the harshest winter in living memory hits – seasonal cold giving way to violent blizzards – each couple is suddenly a prisoner in their own domestic bubble, and each must try to navigate a shrunken world in which they cannot leave home and cannot escape the frozen land around them.

MUNICHS David Peace (Faber)

On 6^th February 1958 the young Manchester United team – the Busby Babes – attempted to take off from a snowy Munich Airport, along with the journalists travelling with the celebrated team.  The British European Airways Flight 609 skidded off the runway and crashed, leaving 21 declared dead on impact, 4 fighting for their lives and 6 critically injured.  Twenty-four hours later and Assistant Manager Jimmy Murphy addressed the press at the Rechts der Isar hospital, promising that, despite the inconceivable tragedy, ‘the Red Devils would rise again.’  This is the story of how that phoenix did indeed rise: the tales of the crash survivors and the victims; of how Britain and football changed in the wake of the accident and how it did not; of what it takes to dare to hope in amongst unimaginable tragedy.

THE SAFEKEEP Yael van der Wouden (Viking)

Fifteen years on from the Second World War and Isabel has built a solitary life for herself in her late mother’s country home: routine, order and discipline are everything.  But when Isabel’s brother Louis arrives unexpectedly with his new girlfriend, Eva, and announces that Eva is to stay with Isabel for the summer season, everything is upended.  As the two women swelter together in the summer heat of Yael van der Wouden’s debut, Isabel’s need for control is at fever pitch, and what happens between the women will bring about a revelation that threatens to unravel everything that Isabel thought she knew.