Man Booker Prize Winners & Finalists (1984)

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Publisher's Comments:

In the novel that won her the Booker Prize and established her international reputation, Anita Brookner finds a new vocabulary for framing the eternal question “Why love?” It tells the story of Edith Hope, who writes romance novels under a pseudonym. When her life begins to resemble the plots of her own novels, however Edith flees to Switzerland , where the quiet luxury of the Hotel du Lac promises to restore her to her senses.

But instead of peace and rest, Edith finds herself sequestered at the Hotel with an assortment of love's casualties and exiles. She also attracts the attention of a worldly man determined to release her unusual capacity for mischief and pleasure. Beautifully observed, witheringly funny, Hotel du Lac is Brookner at her most stylish and potently subversive.

Publisher's Comments:

Wars came early to Shanghai , overtaking each other like the tides that raced up the Yangtze…so begins J.G. Ballard's powerful and moving new novel. Japan invaded China in 1937, and by late 1941 the European inhabitants of Shanghai 's International Settlement had become almost accustomed to life in their fragile island of neutrality, witnessing the brutal reality of Japanese occupation from the safety of their palatial homes and American limousines. For eleven-year-old Jim, born and raised in Shanghai , this was the real war. Events in Europe , glimpsed on flickering newsreels, were as exotic and unreal as the Hollywood epics they preceded.

Then came the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor , followed by the sinking of the British and American warships anchored in the Yangtze. Separated from his parents in the ensuing violence and confusion, Jim spent the following weeks living alone among the grand deserted houses of the British and French Concessions, until he was finally taken into custody and sent to Lunghua internment camp, his home for the next hour years. Here in a world where extreme malnutrition was the norm, and violence and death every day facts of existence, Jim found a kind of peace and security. The British inmates were generally selfish and unfriendly, though the Americans kept Jim occupied with errands, and fed his insatiable curiosity with tattered copies of the Reader's Digest. But the people he admired most were the Japanese guards: the protectors who kept the camp's inmates secure from the war and chaos beyond the perimeter fence. Yet the greatest dangers of all were to come in the summer of 1945 with the dropping of the atomic bombs and the surrender of the Japanese armies…

Based on events J.G. Ballard witnessed while interred in Shanghai during World War II, Empire of the Sun is an extraordinary and original addition to the modern literature of war, a novel worthy to stand in the company of All Quiet on the Western Front and The Naked and the Dead . The horrors and privations of the Japanese internment camps, as seen through the eyes of a child to whom they are part of normal life, and presented unflinchingly; yet the novel is written in prose which is often lyrical and even beautiful. Empire of the Sun is both a radical departure from J.G. Ballard's previous fiction and the triumphant crowning achievement of his career to date.

Publisher's Comments:

A kind of detective story, relating a cranky amateur scholar's search for the truth about Gustave Flaubert, and the obsession of this detective whose life seems to oddly mirror those of Flaubert's characters.

Publisher's Comments:

Asked to interview India 's greatest poet, Nur, Deven sees a way to escape the miseries of life as a small-town scholar. But the old man he finds deep in the bazaars of Old Delhi bears no resemblance to the idol of his youth. Deven is fooled, bullied and cheated, and drawn into a new captivity.

Publisher's Comments:

When Mark Lamming, a well-established biographer, leaves London for Dorset one May morning to meet the granddaughter of his new subject, he has no suspicion that his fulfilling and well-ordered life is about to be turned upside down. Short-listed for the 1984 Booker Prize, According to Mark is many pleasures in one subtly crafted entertainment: the story of a middle-aged man's summer obsession with a young woman, a literary detective story that moves through England and France , and a fascinating inside view of the biographer's exacting art.

Publisher's Comments:

It's academic conference season, and all around the globe—in prefab dorms in provincial England , in luxury hotels in Jerusalem , in the underground chapel at Heathrow—English professors are on the loose. In this second installment in the delightful trilogy of academic satires David Lodge began with Changing Places and ended with Booker Prize nominee Nice Work , the sun has not quite set on the sexual revolution while political correctness has not yet reared its humorless head. Join old friends Morris Zapp and Phillip Swallow, along with a memorable, somewhat oversexed cast of dozens—including a beautiful and mysterious conference addict, a blue-blooded Italian Marxist sadist, and the embittered American novelist and his uncomprehending Japanese translator—as they convene on the conference circuit to compete and couple (and attend the occasional lecture).

Longlist information for 1984 is not available; the Booker Prize did not release longlists until 2001.

Professor Richard Cobb (Chair), Anthony Curtis, Polly Devlin, John Fuller, and Ted Rowlands