Man Booker Prize Winners & Finalists (1979)

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Publisher's Comments:

On the Battersea Reach of the Thames , a mixed bag of the slightly disreputable, the temporarily lost, and the patently eccentric live on houseboats, rising and falling with the great river's tides. Belonging to neither land nor sea, they belong to one another in a motley yet kindly society. There is Maurice, by occupation a male prostitute, by nature a friend to all. And Richard, a buttoned-up ex=navy man, whose boat, much like its owner, dominates the Reach. Then there is Nenna, a faithful, loving, but abandoned wife, the diffident mother of two young girls running wild in the waterfront streets.

It is Nenna's domestic predicament that, as it deepens, draws the relations among this scrabby community together into ever more complex and comic patterns. The result is one of Penelope Fitzgerald's greatest triumphs, a novel the Booker judges deemed “flawless.”

Publisher's Comments:

Thomas Keneally's epic of the Civil War takes us into the lives of four remarkable characters in the embattled Virginia summer of 1862; a southern hospital matron who is also a Union spy, a British war journalist with access to both sides and two foot soldiers under Stonewall Jackson.

Publisher's Comments:

In the "brilliant novel" ( The New York Times ) V.S. Naipaul takes us deeply into the life of one man—an Indian who, uprooted by the bloody tides of Third World history, has come to live in an isolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independent African nation. Naipaul gives us the most convincing and disturbing vision yet of what happens in a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past and traditions.

Publisher's Comments:

Joseph Bosham, self-styled third Viscount of Bosham, with a half-English Catholic priest for a father and an Italian brothel-keeper in place of a mother, educated in mathematics, music and philosophy, but with a gift for narrative and a natural bent for depravity, was born into the turbulent Europe of 1790 and settled in Spain, where gypsies, devil-worshippers and the remnants of the Inquisition fought for space with the great armies of Wellington and Napoleon. Seduced by the hectic glamour of battle at the age of eleven and tossed in its wake for the next fifteen years, little Jose survives as a courier, pimp, linguist, mercenary and mascot to tell his poignant, comic, richly entertaining and tantalizingly unreliable tale.

Publisher's Comments:

Raised by a mad mother and a half-mad sister, abandoned by her father, Praxis Duveen is a master of the art of survival. Her life, indeed, has been full: two marriages, unsuccessful; a brief but profitable career as a prostitute; a little dabbling in incest; a mercy killing; and an inadvertent reign as both apostle and victim of the women's movement.

Buffeted and battered by life, Praxis has survived with energy and humor intact. Her struggles with men and women, with mother and marriages, and most particularly, with herself, become, in Weldon's deft hands, a witty and trenchant commentary on what women want—and what they can actually get.

Longlist information for 1979 is not available; the Booker Prize did not release longlists until 2001.

Lord Asa Briggs (Chair), Benny Green, Michael Ratcliffe, Hilary Spurling, and Paul Theroux