Man Booker Prize Winners & Finalists (1987)

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Publisher's Comments:

Penelope Lively won Britain 's prestigious Booker Prize for this deeply moving, elegantly structured novel. Elderly, uncompromising Claudia Hampton lies in a London hospital bed with memories of life fluttering through her fading consciousness. An author of popular history, Claudia proclaims she's carrying out her last project: a history of the world. This history turns out to be a mosaic of her life, her own story tangled with those of her brother, her lover and father of her daughter, and the center of her life, Tom, her one great love found and lost in war-torn Egypt . Always the independent woman, often with contentious relationships, Claudia's personal history is complex and fascinating. As people visit Claudia, they shake and twist the mosaic, changing speed, movement, and voice, to reveal themselves and Claudia's impact on their world.

Publisher's Comments:

Chirs, Ikem and Beatrice are three like-minded friends working under the military regime of His Excellency, the Sandhurst-educated president of Kangan. In the pressurized atmosphere, they are simply trying to live and love - and remain friends.

Publisher's Comments:

"Thomas Chatterton, England 's famous forger-poet, died in 1777 at the age of seventeen—or did he? Peter Ackroyd's fascinating third novel takes off from the conceit that Chatterton's death, like all that was noteworthy in his life, was a fraud. A gaggle of twentieth century would-be sleuths chase after clues; in 1856, George Meredith poses for Henry Wallis's Death of Chatterton ; minor characters of Dickensian eccentricity bumble splendidly around; and all the time, the serious questions are What is art? What is truth? A delightful, thought-provoking, intelligent book.”

—Voice Literary Supplement

Publisher's Comments:

This is a story about lies and truths and about a painter, a copyist, who paints modern versions of Old Masters and is bothered by bills and artistic conscience in about equal measure…susceptible to, bullied and badgered by women. Major figures on the foreground of his crowded life canvases are Cleo, his child-bride and her young boy; Helen, his first wife who left him, badly, but never really separates; and his mother who observes it all with a splendidly caustic humor. In the background, always, is his own silent son. Nina Bawden is at her best in this novel about the bumbling yet heroic ways we try to defeat the impossibility of protecting another human being with love.

Publisher's Comments:

Somewhere in an unnamed Eastern bloc country, someone is out to silence Cardinal Bem. Is it the Secret Police, or is it—more shockingly—fanatical Catholic activists who believe that Bem, by keeping the peace between church and state, has finally compromised himself too far? Narrowly escaping an assassination attempt, Bem is abducted by sinister, anonymous men, and spirited away to a “safe-house” against his will. Evading his unknown captors, he is faced with a horrifying proposition: no longer sure of whom he can trust, Bem realizes that he alone can avert the revolution which threatens to tear his country apart…

Publisher's Comments:

A group of liberal-minded intellectuals got together in their youth to subsidise their friend, David Crimond to write the definitive book about their political beliefs. Now years later, there is no sign of the book, but Crimond is about to erupt into their lives again. Iris Murdoch has written twenty-three novels to date - all of which are published in Penguin. "The Book and the Brotherhood" was shortlisted for the 1987 Booker Prize.

Longlist information for 1987 is not available; the Booker Prize did not release longlists until 2001.

P.D. James (Chair), Lady Selina Hastings, Allan Massie, Trevor McDonald, and John B. Thompson