Man Booker Prize Winners & Finalists (1985)

Planning to read all of the Booker books?  Download the TurboBookSnob's Tracking Sheet - it contains a complete list of all of the nominated books, with space to track your progress and comments.

   Tracking Sheet

Publisher's Comments:

In a tower on the New Zealand sea lives Kerewin Holmes, part Maori, part European, an artist estranged from her art, a woman in exile from her family. One night her solitude is disrupted by a visitor — a speechless, mercurial boy named Simon, who tries to steal from her and then repays her with his most precious possession. As Kerewin succumbs to Simon's feral charm, she also falls under the spell of his Maori foster father Joe, who rescued the boy from a shipwreck and now treats him with an unsettling mixture of tenderness and brutality. Out of this unorthodox trinity Keri Hulme has created what is at once a mystery, a love story, and an ambitious exploration of the zone where Maori and European New Zealand meet, clash, and sometimes merge.

Publisher's Comments:

In Australian slang, an illywhacker is a country fair con man, an unprincipled seller of fake diamonds and dubious tonics. And Herbert Badgery, the 139-year-old narrator of Peter Carey's uproarious novel, may be the king of them all. Vagabond and charlatan, aviator and car salesman, seducer and patriarch, Badgery is a walking embodiment of the Australian national character — especially of its proclivity for tall stories and barefaced lies. As Carey follows this charming scoundrel across a continent and a century, he creates a crazy quilt of outlandish encounters, with characters that include a genteel dowager who fends off madness with an electric belt and a ravishing young girl with a dangerous fondness for rooftop trysts. Boldly inventive, irresistibly odd, Illywhacker is further proof that Peter Carey is one of the most enchanting writers at work in any hemisphere.

Publisher's Comments:

It is 1929 and young George Gidner is desperate to exchange the toils of teaching in Bradford for a job in the land of his heroes:  the Wild West of America.  So it is that he buys a third-class ticket and sets off on a journey from Liverpool that will eventually bring him to Palisades, South Dakota, and to the banks of the Bitter-root River where, in the cool of the evening, he will stroll down along the wharves and warehouses to watch riversteamers breasting the current en route for Huron, Shenandoah and the head-waters of the Yellowstone River.

Or so George thinks.  The reality proves rather different.  For Palisades consists of six streets bisected by six avenues, overhung with a blank sky, and - most alarming of all - a scarcely suppressed air of violence.  The pupils at the high school where George has come to spend his year provide challenges in plenty.  But these prove to be merely a test-run for the greatest challenge of all:  the Battle of Pollocks Crossing.  Years later, as an old man in Bradford, George would remember the day of the shoot-out with a shudder, the day when heroes died and something died in George's heart too.

Publisher's Comments:

A hugely significant political novel for the late twentieth century from one of the outstanding writers of the modern era In a London squat a band of bourgeois revolutionaries are united by a loathing of the waste and cruelty they see around them. These maladjusted malcontents try desperately to become involved in terrorist activities far beyond their level of competence. Only Alice seems capable of organising anything. Motherly, practical and determined, she is also easily exploited by the group and ideal fodder for a more dangerous and potent cause. Eventually their naive radical fantasies turn into a chaos of real destruction, but the aftermath is not as exciting as they had hoped. Nonetheless, while they may not have changed the world, their lives will never be the same again...

Publisher's Comments:

When the world's foremost travel writer took her first trip to the small multinational port of Hav , it was unlike any of her other journeys. For Hav exists only in one special place—Jan Morris's magnificent imagination.

Here Jan Morris is at her most delightful, engaging us with tales of the arcane splendor of a state on the verge of extinction, a place that reminded her “constantly of places elsewhere, but remained to the end absolutely, often paradoxically and occasionally absurdly, itself.”

Only in Last Letters from Hav will you discover the curious excitement of the traditional Roof Race; can you wander through the back alleys of Hav's ancient waterfront and encounter the specters of its enamored visitors of yesteryear: Freud, Diaghilev, Marco Polo, and Lawrence of Arabia; can you be awakened by the wistful notes of a trumpeter on a far-off minaret. Throughout, the book is haunted by a growing premonition of the catastrophic events that will alter Hav forever, but a reader could not ask for a more masterly guide through this utterly unique place and time.

Publisher's Comments:

"A brilliant entertainment." (Harold Bloom, The New York Times Book Review )

Edward Baltram is overwhelmed with guilt. His nasty little prank has gone horribly wrong: He has fed his closest friend a sandwich laced with a hallucinogenic drug and the young man has fallen out of a window to his death. Edward searches for redemption through a reunion with his famous father, the reclusive painter Jesse Baltram. Funny and compelling, The Good Apprentice is at once a supremely sophisticated entertainment and an inquiry into the spiritual crises that afflict the modern world.

Longlist information for 1985 is not available; the Booker Prize did not release longlists until 2001.

Norman St. John-Stevas (Chair), Nina Bawden, J.W. Lambert, Joanna Lumley, and Marina Warner