Man Booker Prize Winners & Finalists (1986)

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Publisher's Comments:

Malcolm, Peter and Charlie and their Soave-sodden wives have one ambition left in life: to drink Wales dry. But their routine is both shaken and stirred when professional Welshman, Alun Weaver (CBE) and his wife, Rhiannon, join them.

Publisher's Comments:

In the world of the near future, who will control women's bodies?

Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead . She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, because in an age of declining births, Offred and the other Handmaids are only valued if their ovaries are viable.

Offred can remember the days before, when she lived and made love with her husband Luke; when she played with and protected her daughter; when she had a job, money of her own, and access to knowledge. But all of that is gone now...

Publisher's Comments:

“Gabriel Harvey's mother wanted an angel, and her son was happy to oblige. But she mysteriously abandoned him and he remained trapped in a twenty-eight year adolescence and fettered to an unexpressed grief. The discovery and naming of that grief is the subject of this most original novel…touching, beautifully paced and sustained, and quite unforgettable.”

—Mary Flanagan, The Literary Review

Publisher's Comments:

Francis Cornish was always good at keeping secrets. From the well-hidden family secret of his childhood to his mysterious encounters with a small-town embalmer, an expert art restorer, a Bavarian countess, and various masters of espionage, the events in Francis's life were not always what they seemed.

In this wonderfully ingenious portrait of an art expert and collector of international renown, Robertson Davies has created a spellbinding tale of artistic triumph and heroic deceit. It is a tale told in stylish, elegant prose, endowed with lavish portions of Davies's wit and wisdom.

Publisher's Comments:

It is 1948, Japan is rebuilding her cities after the calamity of World War II, her people putting defeat behind them and looking to the future. The celebrated painter, Masuji Ono, fills his days attending to his garden, his house repairs, his two grown daughters and his grandson; his evenings drinking with old associates in quiet lantern-lit bars. His should be a tranquil retirement. But as his memories continually return to the past—to a life and career deeply touched by the rise of Japanese militarism—a dark shadow begins to grow over his serenity.

Publisher's Comments:

A bestseller in hardback and nominee for the Booker Prize, finally back in print after three years of rights battles, this literary masterpiece documents the first Anglo-Chinese Opium War through the eyes of two young Americans on the China Coast in the 1830s.

Longlist information for 1986 is not available; the Booker Prize did not release longlists until 2001.

Anthony Thwaite (Chair), Edna Healey, Isabel Quigley, Gillian Reynolds, and Bernice Rubens