Man Booker Prize Winners & Finalists (1983)

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Publisher's Comments:

In a South Africa torn by civil war, Michael K sets out to take his ailing mother back to her rural home. On the way there she dies, leaving him alone in an anarchic world of brutal roving armies. Imprisoned, Michael is unable to bear confinement and escapes, determined to live with dignity. This life-affirming novel goes to the center of human experience—the need for an interior, spiritual life; for some connections to the world in which we live; and for purity of vision.

Publisher's Comments:

At first glance Doctor Angus Petworth (also called Pitwit, Pervert, and Petwurt by his Soviet-bloc hosts) might appear stuffy; he is a pale-faced, middle-aged British professor of linguistics. But as soon as he sets out on a lecture tour behind the Iron Curtain and becomes embroiled in a confrontation with a matronly stewardess on the plane, it's clear that he is off on a highly unusual adventure. As Petworth makes his rounds of universities and after-hours vodka parties, weaving his way through a labyrinth of confusion, anxiety, and highly unlikely romance, Malcolm Bradbury paints a hilarious portrait of the true meaning of “cultural exchange.”

Publisher's Comments:

This mesmerizing tale is woven around two characters: Vane, an emissary sent by the bishop to investigate the disappearance of a number of pilgrims on the way to the island's miraculous well; and the abbot, who dissects cadavers in his determined search for the physical location of the human soul.

But the mystery at the heart of this haunting novel has to do with much more than these two quests: as Vane searches obsessively for the pilgrims, he sees that the boundaries between body and soul, and between life and death, blur and mingle. Filled with everyday happenings and miraculous events, Flying to Nowhere, like The Name of the Rose, is at once a provocative allegory and a vastly entertaining murder mystery.

Publisher's Comments:

At a time of great uncertainty, people are looking for answers in their sacred writings, and those writings promise them a Deliverer. Can it be that Simon Magus, necromancer, philosopher, outcast and magician, is the man they are waiting for? He can carry out fantastic deeds.

Publisher's Comments:

In this brilliant novel, Salman Rushdie masterfully combines history, art, language, politics, and religion. Set in a country "not quite Pakistan ," the story centers around the families of two men-one a celebrated warrior, the other, a debauched playboy-engaged in a protracted duel that is played out in the political landscape of their country. Shame is a tour de force and a fitting predecessor to the author's legendary novel, The Satanic Verses.

Publisher's Comments:

Set in the bleak Fen country of East Anglia and spanning some 240 years in the lives of its haunted narrator and his ancestors, Waterland is a book that takes in eels and incest, ale-making and madness, the heartless sweep of history and a family romance as tormented as any in Greek tragedy.

Longlist information for 1983 is not available; the Booker Prize did not release longlists until 2001.

Fay Weldon (Chair), Angela Carter, Terence Kilmartin, Peter Porter, and Libby Purves