Man Booker Prize Winners & Finalists (1980)

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Publisher's Comments:

In the early 1800s, Edmund Talbot, a young and rather priggish Englishman, takes passage on a boat heading for Australia where he is to be an official in the colonial government. In addition to Talbot, many of the eccentric passengers--a sexually predatory sailor, the aging coquette Miss Zenobia Brocklebank, the ship's tyrannical captain--undergo profound changes in the course of the voyage, during which a naive clergyman is victimized and, finally, pushed to suicide. These events are described in the diary Talbot keeps en route. "Rites of Passage" won the Booker McConnell prize in 1980.*

Publisher's Comments:

Anthony Burgess' epic masterpiece follows the lives of two men who each represent different kinds of earthly power. Kenneth Toomey is an eminent novelist, world-famous homosexual, and a man who has outlived his contemporaries to survive into honoured, bitter, luxurious old age as a celebrity of dubious notoriety. Don Carlo Campanati is a man of God, who rises through the Vatican as a subtle negotiator and shrewd manipulator to become the controversial architect of church revolution and a candidate for sainthood. Through the lives of these two men, related to each other not only by family ties but also by sympathy, genius and a deep common understanding of mankind's frailties, Burgess explores the very essence of power.

Publisher's Comments:

In J. L. Carr's deeply charged poetic novel, Tom Birkin, a veteran of the Great War and a broken marriage, arrives in the remote Yorkshire village of Oxgodby where he is to restore a recently discovered medieval mural in the local church. Living in the bell tower, surrounded by the resplendent countryside of high summer, and laboring each day to uncover an anonymous painter's depiction of the apocalypse, Birkin finds that he himself has been restored to a new, and hopeful, attachment to life. But summer ends, and with the work done, Birkin must leave. Now, long after, as he reflects on the passage of time and the power of art, he finds in his memories some consolation for all that has been lost.

Publisher's Comments:

Memories of the past coalesce with the tensions and jealousies of the present in this sharply drawn and sorrowful portrait of the ebb and flow of sisterly love.

Tara 's visit to her childhood home stirs the resentments of Bim, her older sister. Bim still lives in the shabby, dusty house, taking care of their autistic brother, Baba. Instead of a joyful reunion, Tara 's visit becomes a sharp reminder to Bim of her frustrated expectations and of what life might have been.

Publisher's Comments:

In this exhilarating series of interweaving stories, Alice Munro re-creates the evolving bond—one that is both constricting and empowering—between two women in the course of almost forty years. One is Flo, practical, suspicious of other people's airs, at times dismayingly vulgar. The other is Rose, Flo's stepdaughters a clumsy, shy girl who somehow—in spite of Flo's ridicule and ghastly warnings—leaves the small town she grew up in to achieve her own equivocal success in the larger world.

Publisher's Comments:

There is a recurrent nightmare that haunts Sister Judith Clancy, something dark and dangerous, a buried trauma slowly reforming in her mind. Is she privy to a secret of national importance? Is this why she has spent half a century incarcerated in a convent? Is this why she has withdrawn into a kaleidoscope world of half-remembered visions of young men, of freedom fighters and cabinet ministers?

The order is to be secularized. The nuns, stripped of their habits, are to be dispersed among the faithful in poorer parts of the city. Sister Judith, too old to serve, is to be restored to her family. But Judith's release poses a threat for a number of people. What she may know endangers the source of Irish-American dollars raised for the Republican cause because Judith was an eyewitness on that night in 1922 when one of the great martyrs was supposedly killed by Orangemen in the North.

Julia O'Faolain unleashes a brilliant and devastating story of human and political relations in contemporary Ireland . Characters are captive to memory; history is a tale of madness; and buried secrets shape and reshape the Baroque geometry of family emotions connecting the heroic and the despairing. This is a memorable portrait of time and place and state of mind.

With wit and compassion the novel tells of four generations of two Irish families and their attempt to come to terms with the after-effects of The Irish Civil War—the “troubles” of the 1920s that live on to this day.

Publisher's Comments:

The year is 1908, the place, a small Greek island in the declining days of the crumbling Ottoman Empire . For twenty years Basil Pascali has spied on the people of his small community and secretly reported on their activities to the authorities in Constantinople . Although his reports are never acknowledged, never acted upon, he has received regular payment for his work. Now he fears that the villagers have found him out and he becomes engulfed in paranoia. In the midst of his panic, a charming Englishman arrives on the island claiming to be an archaeologist, and charms his way into the heart of the woman for whom Pascali pines. A complex game is played out between the two where cunning and betrayal may come to haunt them both. Pascali's Island was made into a feature film starring Ben Kingsley and Helen Mirren.

Longlist information for 1980 is not available; the Booker Prize did not release longlists until 2001.

Professor David Daiches (Chair), Ronald Blythe, Margaret Forster, Claire Tomalin, and Brian Wenham