Man Booker Prize Winners & Finalists (1977)

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Publisher's Comments:

In this sequel to The Raj Quartet , Colonel Tusker and Lucy Smalley cling to their bungalow in the hills of Pankot after Indian independence deprives them of their colonial status. Lucy, fed up with accommodating her husband, tries to assert her own independence. In scenes both poignant and hilarious, she and Tusker act out class tensions among the British of the Raj and eloquently give voice to the loneliness, rage, and stubborn affection in their marriage.

Publisher's Comments:

Peter Smart's mother, as a fellow actor points out to him, is a comic monster: "Only Wagner could do her justice". She's matched by the eccentric, F. Leonard Cottle, a randy retired doctor, who employs Peter's mother as housekeeper, and introduces the boy Peter to the facts of life.

Publisher's Comments:

Short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1977, Caroline Blackwood's semiautobiographical masterpiece shows us the chilliest of matriarchs, and the emotional havoc she presides over, as seen through the eyes of a teenage girl. Although its deceptively concise, it evokes the spirits of no less than four ages ... in exact and resonant prose.

Publisher's Comments:

At home in Derry young Joe Logan is tormented by the demands of his father, once a hero, now a weak and wasted man. At school Joe dreams away the days, waiting for better times to come. Times when the bullets cease and the nights are free from fear.

Befriended by Kathleen, a teacher at a nearby school, he finds a new companionship and understanding. Then Brendan, Joe's older brother, returns home from London with a gun and a pocketful of secrets, and the brutality and ugliness of war close in on Joe, destroying his dreams for ever.

Publisher's Comments:

Anne Linton's life is split in two when her dying father, James Stanway, is taken into a nursing home in distant Lichfield . Leaving her family behind in Berkshire , she sets up camp in her father's house. As she shares his last weeks, Anne finds herself entering unchartered territory when she and David Fielding meet and fall in love. But love, like death, brings many buried feelings back into sharp focus.

Publisher's Comments:

Quartet in Autumn is the first of Barbara Pym's later novels and is considered by many to be her masterpiece. It was written during a time when the author had lost hope of ever being published again and is drawn from Pym's own confrontation with mortality, but is leavened by her dry wit. This softly compelling story of human dignity in the midst of hopelessness presents us with four elderly single people who work in the same office. When the two women retire, this act threatens the lives of all four. Out of tragicomic themes of old age, Barbara Pym has written a tale of almost musical perfection.

Longlist information for 1977 is not available; the Booker Prize did not release longlists until 2001.

Philip Larkin (Chair), Beryl Bainbridge, Brendan Gill, David Hughes, and Robin Ray