The Toffee Man wins the Booklife Prize 2025

News just in: it's 4am! How do I get back to sleep now? Thank you everyone.

L.K. Quinn’s darkly beautiful novel wins the BookLife Prize.

The BookLife Prize critic’s report for The Toffee Man and the Kingdom of Ends praised Quinn’s ability to convey a childlike perspective without sacrificing subtlety or dimension. “Quinn creates a claustrophobic atmosphere, with an overriding sense of catastrophe brewing throughout,” the reviewer wrote. “The novel’s power lies in Quinn’s ability to vividly sketch the all-too-common struggles of this world: poverty, abuse, marginalization, and a desperate search to carve meaning out of a life of suffering.”

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of Terry Dactyl, who selected the book as a finalist, extolled The Toffee Man and the Kingdom of Ends as “a book about childhood and longing, belief and loss, and the lies adults tell to imprison truth. Here we experience the making of a self in a world that refuses to allow girls to draw their own maps—all the intimacy and craving, the openness and heartbreak.”

• An article in Publishers' Weekly can be read here.

• The list of finalists for this year's BookLife Prize can be seen here.