Man Booker Prize Winners & Finalists (1971)

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Publisher's Comments:

This is a sequence, part fiction, part documentary, and at its heart is a novel of great brilliance.

This novel is set in a free state in Africa at a time of civil conflict when a once-ruling tribe is being decimated. But for English people like Bobby and Linda, driving back from the capital to their expatriates' compound, the roads are open. Neutral, white, protected, they have both in their different ways found liberation in Africa , and they too might be said to be “in a free state ,” But their neutrality will not last; there is danger on the open road.

Exploiter and exploited: it is one of the conditions of men in a free state that the roles should ceaselessly shift. This is not the Africa of romance or “service,” but something infinitely more ambiguous.

Publisher's Comments:

Not available at this time.

Publisher's Comments:

An extraordinary blend of fantasy and realism, this is classic Lessing, reissued here with a stunning new cover design. Penniless, rambling and incoherent, a man is found wandering at night on London 's Embankment. Taken to hospital and heavily sedated, he tells the doctors of his incredible fantastical voyage, adrift on the ocean, landing on unknown shores, flying on the back of a huge white bird. Identified as Charles Walker, a Cambridge Classics professor, he is visited by family and friends, each revealing clues to the nature of his breakdown: both his young wife, Felicity, and his mistress, Constance , have been troubled by his cold detachment; his fellow dons are bewildered by Watkins's recent anti-social outburst and anarchistic theories on the futility of education. As the doctors try to cure him, Watkins begins a fierce battle to hold on to his magnificent inner world, as it gradually acquires a greater reality than the everyday... An extraordinary blend of fantasy and realism, Briefing for a Descent into Hell is one of Doris Lessing's most brilliantly achieved novels; it links her early work, which explored the nature of subjectivity, with her later experiments in science fiction.

Publisher's Comments:

Jake Hersh, thirty-seven, is a near-famous film and TV director living in London—worlds away from the poor, Jewish St. Urbain's Street in Montreal, where he grew up worshipping his cousin Joey, the Avenger on Horseback, missing since the age of eight-teen and presumed to be in Paraguay on the trail of the notorious Dr. Mengele. Hersh's life suddenly takes a turn for the worst when he is accused of an unspeakable crime by Ingrid, a sexy German au pair girl, and finds himself a prisoner in the dock at the Old Bailey.

In this complex, moving, and comic novel, Richler conveys a generation consumed with guilt—guilt at not joining every battle, at not healing every wound, and guilt at not riding to the rescue of all, side by side with the avenger himself, “St. Urbain's Horseman.”

Publisher's Comments:

For Stanley Woolley, commanding officer of Goshawk Squadron, the romance of chivalry in the clouds is just a myth. The code he drums into his men is simple and savage: shoot the enemy in the back before he knows you're there. Even so, he believes the whole squadron will be dead within three months. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, this is Derek Robinson's masterly novel of the war in the air over the Western Front in 1918.

Publisher's Comments:

Mrs. Palfrey arrives at the Claremont Hotel where she will spend her remaining days. Her fellow residents are magnificently flawed and eccentric. Together, they fight off their twin enemies: boredom and the Grim Reaper. Then one day Mrs. Palfrey encounters the handsome young writer, Ludo.

Longlist information for 1971 is not available; the Booker Prize did not release longlists until 2001.

John Gross (Chair), Saul Bellows, John Fowles, Lady Antonia Fraser, and Phillip Toynbee