Man Booker Prize Winners & Finalists (1989)

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Publisher's Comments:

The Remains of the Day is a profoundly compelling portrait of the perfect English butler and of his fading, insular world in postwar England . At the end of his three decades of service at Darlington Hall, Stevens embarks on a country drive, during which he looks back over his career to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving "a great gentleman." But lurking in his memory are doubts about the true nature of Lord Darlington's "greatness" and graver doubts about his own faith in the man he served.

Publisher's Comments:

Cat's Eye is the story of Elaine Risley, a controversial painter who returns to Toronto , the city of her youth, for a retrospective of her art. Engulfed by vivid images of the past, she reminisces about a trio of girls who initiated her into the fierce politics of childhood and its secret world of friendship, longing, and betrayal. Elaine must come to terms with her own identity as a daughter, a lover, an artist, and a woman--but above all she must seek release from her haunting memories. Disturbing, hilarious, and compassionate, Cat's Eye is a breathtaking novel of a woman grappling with the tangled knot of her life.

Publisher's Comments:

Freddie Montgomery is on trial for a murder he committed because he could. Finding himself without sufficient funds to pay back a debt, and leaving his wife and child behind as collateral on a Mediterranean island, Montgomery has returned to Ireland after years of self-imposed exile to raise the money. But all sources appear to have dried up. Even the few pictures his family owned have all been sold off. In a blindly desperate attempt to get back one of those paintings, he bludgeons a young girl and hides from the police, implicating an old family friend before he is caught. How did her—with his background, education, culture—come to this?

Shortlsted for the Booker Prize, The Book of Evidence presents the engrossing testimony of an improbable murderer, offering not evidence of his innocence, but of his life. In startlingly fluid prose, at once coldly terrifying and darkly funny, the narrative reveals an articulate villain whose amorality is as much a revelation to himself as his humanity is to us.

Publisher's Comments:

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Sybille Bedford's latest novel haunts the borderlands of autobiography and fiction. It picks up where her first, A Legacy, left off, leading us out of the Kaiser's Germany into the wider Europe of the 1920s and the limbo between world wars. The narrator, Billi, tells the story of her scholar-gypsy childhood and of her many teachers, beginning with her father, a pleasure-loving German baron, and her brilliant, beautiful, erratic mother. Later, on the Mediterranean coast of France , she meets the artists and intellectuals who will show her the way to a life's work in literature, among them the Huxleys, Aldous and Maria. Germany , Italy , England , France ; mentors, examples, seducers, friends—each place, each person is a bright piece in the puzzle of Billi's identity. But Billi is more than the sum of all these pieces, just as Jigsaw is more than the sum of Bedford's art.

Publisher's Comments:

Patrick Doyle is a 29 year old teacher in an ordinary school. Disaffected, frustrated and increasingly bitter at the system he is employed to maintain, Patrick begins his rebellion, fuelled by drink and his passionate, unrequited love for a fellow teacher.

Publisher's Comments:

To young Robert Merivel, the court of Charles II seems like Paradise . Summoned to the court as doctor to the royal dogs, Merivel soon finds himself married to the King's beautiful mistress and the recipient of a lavish estate. But his good fortune comes to an abrupt end when he makes a serious mistake. Merivel falls in love with his own wife and he must escape or be punished. Laced with acutely observed historical detail, humor, and poignancy, Restoration is a dazzling and entertaining romp through seventeenth-century England .

Longlist information for 1989 is not available; the Booker Prize did not release longlists until 2001.

David Lodge (Chair), Maggie Gee, Helen McNeil, David Profumo, and Edmund White