Man Booker Prize Winners & Finalists (1972)

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Publisher's Comments:

In this luminous novel -- winner of Britain 's prestigious Booker Prize -- John Berger relates the story of "G.," a young man forging an energetic sexual career in Europe during the early years of this century. With profound compassion, Berger explores the hearts and minds of both men and women, and what happens during sex, to reveal the conditions of the Don Juan's success: his essential loneliness, the quiet cumulation in each of his sexual experiences of all of those that precede it, the tenderness that infuses even the briefest of his encounters, and the way women experience their own extraordinariness through their moments with him. All of this Berger sets against the turbulent backdrop of Garibaldi and the failed revolution of Milanese workers in 1898, the Boer War, and the first flight across the Alps, making G. a brilliant novel about the search for intimacy in history's private moments.

Publisher's Comments:

Francis Croft, the greatest poet of his age, was mad. His world was a nightmare of internal furies and haunting poetic vision. Harvey Lawson watched and protected him until his final suicide. From his solitary old age Harvey writes this brief account of their twenty years together and then burns all the papers to shut out an inquisitive world.

The tautness and control that characterize Susan Hill's work are abundantly evident in The Bird of Night as she magnificently handles the heights and depths, the splendours and miseries of madness and friendship.

Publisher's Comments:

"Jimmie Blacksmith is the son of an Aboriginal mother and a white father. A missionary shows him what it means to be white - already he is only too aware of what it means to be black. Exploited by his white employers and betrayed by his white wife Jimmie cannot take any more. He must find a way to express his rage.

" The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith is based on an actual incident that occurred at the turn of the century. Set against the background of a turbulent Australian history, Thomas Keneally records with clarity the chant of one troubled man."

Publisher's Comments:

Colin Pasmore is almost thirty, a lecturer in history at a university in London . Married, with three young children, settled in his job as well as in his private life, he is suddenly beset by a dream which, almost without his being aware of it, undermines his entire life. He sees his home, his friends, his work gradually slip away from him; terrified and bewildered, he seems condemned irretrievably to experience the total destruction not only of the life he knew but of his own moral and psychic nature.

This is unquestionably David Storey's most important novel; it expresses movingly, with great cogency and simplicity, the downfall and subsequent regeneration of a man who, in all senses of the word, has given himself up for lost.

Pasmore is the product of a writer who has been described as “the leading novelist of his generation.” With this novel, David Storey can stand comparison with any other writer working in England today.

Longlist information for 1972 is not available; the Booker Prize did not release longlists until 2001.

Cyril Connelly (Chair), Dr George Steiner and Elizabeth Bowen