Man Booker Prize Winners & Finalists (1988)

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Publisher's Comments:

This sweeping, irrepressibly inventive novel is a romance, but a romance of the sort that could only take place in nineteenth-century Australia . For only on that sprawling continent — a haven for misfits of both the animal and human kingdoms — could a nervous Anglican minister who gambles on the instructions of the Divine become allied with a teenaged heiress who buys a glassworks to help liberate her sex. And only the prodigious imagination of Peter Carey could implicate Oscar and Lucinda in a narrative of love and commerce, religion and colonialism, that culminates in a half-mad expedition to transport a glass church across the Outback.

Publisher's Comments:

Utz collects Meissen porcelain with a passion. His collection, which he has protected and enlarged through both World War II and Czechoslovakia's years of Stalinism, numbers more than 1000 pieces, all crammed into his two-bedroom Prague flat.

Utz is allowed to leave the country each year, and although he has considered defection, he always returns. He cannot take his precious collection with him, but he cannot leave it, either. And so Utz is as much owned by his porcelain as it is owned by him, as much as a prisoner of the collection as of the Communist state.

A fascinating, enigmatic man, Kaspar Utz is one of Bruce Chatwin's finest creations. And his story, as delicately cast as one of Utz's porcelain figures, is unforgettable.

Publisher's Comments:

In March 1913, and dear slovenly Mother Moscow, her windows still sealed against the cold of winter, is stirring herself to meet the beginning of spring. Change is in the air—uncertainly, too —and nowhere more than at 22 Lipka Street , the home of the English printer Frank Reid. Frank returns from work one night to find that his wife has gone away; no one knows where or why, or whether she'll ever come back. All Frank knows for sure is that he is now alone and must find someone to care for his three young children.

Into Frank's life comes Lisa Ivanova, a quiet, calming beauty from the country, untroubled to the point of seeming simple. But is she? And why has Frank's book-keeper, Selwin Crane, gone to such lengths to bring these two together? Who is the passionate Volodya, who breaks into the press at night—a thief, an agitator, a would-be murderer? Frank sees, but only dimly, for he is a rational man in Moscow, a city where human experience—of love and friendship, of politics and power—is always at its most unfathomable.

Publisher's Comments:

Back in Rummidge, scene of "Changing Places", Robyn Penrose, temporary lecturer in English literature and Vic Willcox, MD of Pringle and Sons Industrial Engineering meet when they take part in an "Industry Year" scheme. David Lodge is the author of "The British Museum is Falling Down".

Publisher's Comments:

Just before dawn one winter's morning, a hijacked jetliner explodes above the English Channel . Through the falling debris, two figures, Gibreel Farishta, the biggest star in India, and Saladin Chamcha, an expatriate returning from his first visit to Bombay in fifteen years, plummet from the sky, washing up on the snow-covered sands of an English beach, and proceed through a series of metamorphoses, dreams, and revelations.

Publisher's Comments:

Like Visconti's film The Leopard , this magnificent novel paints in sensuous colours the story of a family. It brings to new life the ancient disparaged south of the Italian peninsula, weakened by emigration, silenced by fascism.

According to family legend, David Pittagors died as a result of a duel. His death is the mysterious pivot around which his grand-daughter, an independent modern woman, constructs an imaginary memoir of her mother's background and life. She follows the family as they emigrate to New York - where they find only humiliation and poverty - and after their return to Italy in the 1920s. As she is drawn by the passions and prejudices of her imagination, we see how family memory, like folk memory, weaves its own dreams.

(From www.marinawarner.com )

Longlist information for 1988 is not available; the Booker Prize did not release longlists until 2001.

The Right Honourable Michael Foot (Chair), Sebastian Faulks, Philip French, Blake Morrison, and Rose Tremain