Man Booker Prize Winners & Finalists (1978)

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Publisher's Comments:

Charles Arrowby, leading light of England 's theatrical set, retires from glittering London to an isolated home by the sea. He plans to write a memoir about his great love affair with Clement Makin, his mentor both professionally and personally, and to amuse himself with Lizzie, an actress her has strung along for many years. Non of his plans work out, and his memoir evolves into a riveting chronicle of the strange events and unexpected visitors—some real, some spectral—that disrupt his world and shake his oversized ego to its very core.

In exposing the jumble of motivations that drive Arrowby and the other characters, Iris Murdoch lays bare “the truth of untruth” —the human vanity, jealousy, and lack of compassion behind the disguises they present to the world. Played out against a vividly rendered landscape and filled with allusions to myth and magic, Charles's confrontation with the tidal rips of love and forgiveness is one of Murdoch's most moving and powerful tales.

Publisher's Comments:

When trout with almonds and Thunderball on the television seems a more enticing prospect than a romp with your bosomy ex-mistress from Baltimore, then something is seriously wrong—or so thinks Jake Richardson, an Oxford don nearing sixty with a lifetime's lechery behind him. In pursuit of his lost libido, Jake heads for Harley Street and the consulting room of a miniature sex therapist from the Emerald Isle. Not one to disobey a doctor's order, he runs the full humiliating gamut of sex labs in Colliers Wood and trendy “Workshops” where more than souls are bared. He decks himself with cunning gadgetry, dreams up a weekly fantasy (“Come dirty , Mr. Richardson”), pets diligently with his overweight wife Brenda, and browses listlessly through porno magazines behind locked doors. Is sex, and the female one in particular, really worth it? As liberationists abuse him, a neurotic nymph pursues him, a campus hostess bores him into bed—and even his own wife starts acting oddly—Jake seriously begins to wonder.

Kingsley Amis at his spikiest and best takes a shrewd look at the crankier fringes of psychotherapy, at its hardware and jargon, its practitioners and victims and —beyond all that—at where ex, Seventies-style, has landed us. This hilarious and touching study of a satyr in retreat is his funniest novel for a generation.

Publisher's Comments:

Winter in South Africa - a time of drought, angry stirrings in Soweto , and the shadow of conflict in Angola cast across the scorched bush. A wealthy Afrikaner's weekend visit to his old family farm coincides with a time of personal crisis. The author has twice been runner-up for the Booker Prize.

Publisher's Comments:

In 1959 Florence Green, a kindhearted widow with a small inheritance, risks everything to open a bookshop -- the only bookshop -- in the seaside town of Hardborough . By making a success of a business so impractical, she invites the hostility of the town's less prosperous shopkeepers. By daring to enlarge her neighbors' lives, she crosses Mrs. Gamart, the local arts doyenne. Florence 's warehouse leaks, her cellar seeps, and the shop is apparently haunted. Only too late does she begin to suspect the truth: a town that lacks a bookshop isn't always a town that wants one.

Publisher's Comments:

During one glorious summer between the wars, the realities of life and the sexual ritual dance of the adult world creep into the life of young Margaret Marsh. Her father, preaching the doctrine of the unsavoury Primal Saints; her mother, bitterly nostalgic for what might have been; Charles and Binkie, anchored in the past and a game of words; dying Mrs. Frayling and Lydia the maid, given to the vulgar enjoyment of life; all contribute to Margaret's shattering moment of truth. And when the storm breaks, it is not only God who is on the rocks as the summer hurtles towards drama, tragedy, and a touch of farce.

Publisher's Comments:

A Booker Prize runner up. Miss Hawkins looked at her watch. It was 2.30. If everything went to plan, she would be dead by six o'clock . But instead, having been sentenced to live, she embarked on a mission to taste life's secret pleasures. The author won the Booker Prize for "The Elected Member".

Longlist information for 1978 is not available; the Booker Prize did not release longlists until 2001.

Sir Alfred Ayer (Chair), Derwent May, P.H. Newby, Angela Huth, and Clare Boylan