Man Booker Prize Winners & Finalists (1969)

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Publisher's Comments:

Anthony West has called P.H. Newby “the most interesting and intellectually distinguished English writer to have come into view since the end of the Second World War.” Something to Answer For brilliantly illuminates this judgment.

The story concerns itself with Jack Townrow, returned to Port Said as the 1956 Suez crisis is burgeoning. His intention is simply to help the widow of an old friend settle her affairs—and benefit as he might thereby. But nothing is simple: the widow is not uncertain what she wants to do; Townrow cannot find out how his friend died—or even where the body is. And in the vortex of confusion, rumors, and violence, Townrow meets the Egyptian Jewess, Leah Strauss, an enigma, a temptation, and finally a consuming passion.

Subtly manipulating both his characters and his reader, the author removes the novel from the common stream of experience. Unsuspectingly, Townrow is thrust into a clockless world, one that has lost its accustomed dimensions—a world we all inhabit in sleep, in fantasy in fever. Neither he nor the reader can distinguish between the real and the unreal: Is the coffin ever borne across an empty sea to Lebanon for burial? Is it dream or delirium that Townrow is betrayed, nearly murdered, makes love, while the city shudders through its own life-and-death struggle?

Strange things happen to a man as he struggles toward self-discovery. In Townrow's search for identity, the present becomes sometimes a battleground, sometimes a no-man's land, in the tug of war between the past and the future. This book ends with the end of that war. Neither a surrender nor a victory, it may perhaps be best described as a cessation of hostilities: the shooting is over, but the peace terms have yet to be fully worked out. But this much Townrow learns: “A man had decided, absolutely, to answer for himself.”

In prose as evocative as poetry, the story seductively unfolds on two levels of reality, challenging and capturing the perceptive reader from beginning to end.

Publisher's Comments:

Two soldiers have escaped from a column of prisoners of war, with one gun and a few rounds of ammunition. Their most important resource being their instinct to survive. Safety is 400 miles away, across savage country but all the time they are pursued by a helicopter which hovers overhead. From the author of No Man's Land .

Publisher's Comments:

Through the lives of a couple observed by different narrators, the eight artfully interconnected stories of Impossible Object explore the notion, exemplified by the controlling symbol of “the triangle that can exist in two dimensions but not in three,” that life can never be realized , except in the recognition of the impossibility of attaining it. Nicholas Mosley's provocative theme is as original as it is utterly compelling.

Publisher's Comments:

A novel originally published in 1968, revolving around a happily married couple and telling of a violent death, blackmail, suspected espionage, Black Arts, stress and terror, over which love conquers all.

Publisher's Comments:

“An ethical shocker” is the summing-up of this dazzling book by its dazzlingly talented author. Annabel, one of Muriel Spark's least equivocal and most enchanting heroines, is a film star whose public image is vulnerable. Whose is not? Muriel Spark's unique view of human values is brilliantly illuminated by the contrasting aspects of its setting—among the ruthless flux of celebrity and fringe life in Italy “the motherland of sensation,” and placed among the changeless features of Rome .

Publisher's Comments:

Set in a small west of Scotland town in the 1950s, From Scenes Like These is the powerful and violent story of Duncan Logan, an adolescent growing up fast in the austere years after the Second World War. His father is brutal, his life seems drab and pointless, and the future looks bleak. As his world begins to crumble around him, Duncan searches desperately for a way out, only to find himself trapped in a downward spiral of betrayal and violence...

Longlist information for 1969 is not available; the Booker Prize did not release longlists until 2001.

W.L. Webb (Chair), Dame Rebecca West, Stephen Spender, Frank Kermode, and David Farrer