Man Booker Prize Winners & Finalists (1982)

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Publisher's Comments:

A stunning novel based on the true story of how German war profiteer and prison camp direktor Oskar Schindler came to save more Jews from the gas chambers than any other single person during World War II.

In this milestone of Holocaust literature, Thomas Keneally uses the actual testimony of the Schindlerjuden— Schindler's Jew s— to brilliantly portray the courage and cunning of a good man in the midst of unspeakable evil.

Publisher's Comments:

Publisher's Comments:

1914. In a hotel room in German East Africa , American farmer Walter Smith dreams of Theodore Roosevelt. As he sleeps, a railway passenger swats at flies, regretting her decision to return to the Dark Continent --and to her husband. On a faraway English riverbank, a jealous Felix Cobb watches his brother swim, and curses his sister-in-law-to-be. And in the background of the
world's daily chatter: rumors of an Anglo-German conflict, the likes of which no one has ever seen.

In An Ice-Cream War , William Boyd brilliantly evokes the private dramas of a generation upswept by the winds of war. After his German neighbor burns his crops--with an apology and a smile--Walter Smith takes up arms on behalf of Great Britain . And when Felix's brother marches off to defend British East Africa , he pursues, against his better judgment, a forbidden love affair. As the sons of the world match wits and weapons on a continent thousands of miles from home, desperation makes bedfellows of enemies and traitors of friends and family. By turns comic and quietly wise, An Ice-Cream War deftly renders lives capsized by violence, chance, and the irrepressible human capacity for love.

Publisher's Comments:

The party is over, and the world is in the throes of the 1939-45 war, but the story continues as patterns set in Monsieur and Livia are developed against a background which shifts between Cairo, Geneva, and Avignon.

The idyllic last summer of Livia seems now forever in the past, like some lost Garden of Eden…but figures from other times and other places loom up—sometimes disconcertingly—in the twilight zone between the real and imagined worlds: Constance herself, professionally expert in Freudian analysis, but discovering passion for the first time; her tragic, doomed sister Livia; the mercurial Prince Hassad; shaggy, lumbering Rob Sutcliffe, who here at last comes face to face with his creator, Aubrey Blanford, in a significant encounter.

Constance is the third to appear of Lawrence Durrell's quincunx of novels, and in it he takes one stage further his exploration of the relationships between the novelist and his medium, and between his characters and the themes upon which they are variations. As the design of the whole work becomes clear it's characteristic qualities of expression and structure suggest an artistic achievement likely to match that of The Alexandria Quartet, with which the time scheme and the Egyptian sequences of the present volume form a link. Certainly the pleasures offered to the reader, new to the work or not, match the reputation of its author.

Publisher's Comments:

For those who have no idea, the 27 th Kingdom is located in Chelsea , where Aunt Irene lives in a cozy, cluttered ménage with Kyril, her nephew. Their peace, however, is about to be invaded by Valentine, a young postulant sent by her Reverend Mother to “test her vocation…”

Publisher's Comments:

Shortlisted for the 1982 Booker Prize, this novel explores the clans and conflicts of Soho's Chinatown, where the Chen family arrive and want to succeed as restaurateurs in the 1960s. No family can survive for long without encountering the Triads. By the author of "The Redundancy of Courage".

Longlist information for 1982 is not available; the Booker Prize did not release longlists until 2001.

Professor John Carey (Chair), Paul Bailey, Frank Delaney, Janet Morgan, and Lorna Sage