Man Booker Prize Winners & Finalists (1990)

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Publisher's Comments:

Hailed by The New York Times Book Review as "a gifted observer, able to discern the exact details that bring whole worlds into being" and "a storyteller who could keep a sultan on the edge of his throne for a thousand and one nights," A. S. Byatt writes some of the most engaging and skillful novels of our time. Time magazine calls her "a novelist of dazzling inventiveness."

Possession , for which Byatt won England 's prestigious Booker Prize, was praised by critics on both sides of the Atlantic when it was first published in 1990. "On academic rivalry and obsession, Byatt is delicious. On the nature of possession--the lover by the beloved, the biographer by his subject--she is profound," said The Sunday Times ( London ). The New Yorker dubbed it "more fun to read than The Name of the Rose . . . Its prankish verve [and] monstrous richness of detail [make for] a one-woman variety show of literary styles and types." The novel traces a pair of young academics--Roland Michell and Maud Bailey--as they uncover a clandestine love affair between two long-dead Victorian poets. Interwoven in a mesmerizing pastiche are love letters and fairytales, extracts from biographies and scholarly accounts, creating a sensuous and utterly delightful novel of ideas and passions.

Publisher's Comments:

This newest novel by one of Britain's leading writers tells the darkly humorous tale of Stella, a star-struck, teen-aged actress caught up in the backstage intrigues of a 1950s Liverpool theater repertory company. Stella romances the director of a production of Peter Pan with consequences that would be uproariously funny if they were not so dire. The play becomes a metaphor for the darker side of youth as Stella is drawn into very adult mayhem.

By turns funny and chilling, subtly laced with cool undertones of violence, this provocative and compelling novel shows the author at the top of her writing form.

Publisher's Comments:

It is 1912, and at Cambridge University the modern age is knocking at the gate. In lecture halls and laboratories, the model of a universe governed by The Mind of God is at last giving way to something wholly rational, a universe governed by the Laws of Physics. To Fred Fairly, a junior fellow at the College of St. Angelicus , this comes as a great comfort. Science, he is certain, will soon explain everything. Mystery will be routed by reason, and the demands of the soul will be seen for what they are—a distraction and an illusion.

Into Fred's orderly life comes Daisy, with a bang—literally. One moment the two are perfect strangers, fellow cyclists on a dark country road; the next, they are casualties of a freakish accident, occupants of the same warm bed. Fred has never been so close to a woman before, surely none so pretty, so plainspoken, and yet so—mysterious. Who is this Daisy Saunders, he wonders. Why have I met her? As the smitten Fred pursues these questions, Penelope Fitzgerald suggests that scientists can still be mistaken—and that the soul must still be answered—even in this age of the atom.

Publisher's Comments:

Michael Moran is an old Republican whose life was transformed by his days of glory as a guerilla fighter in the War of Independence. Now much older, he is still fighting -- with a second wife, his daughters, his sons, his old friends, even with himself -- in a poignant struggle in which fear is tempered by love.

Publisher's Comments:

For Michael Dillon that moment arrives just as he is making a decision that he expects will bring him his greatest happiness. But the expectation suddenly turns into a nightmare. On the very evening his life is to change, Dillon, unable to sleep, looks out his bedroom window and sees a white car slowly driving in front of his house. Two men come up the path to the front door. They are masked and have guns. Holding Dillon's wife at gunpoint, they order him to carry out their instructions and to speak to no one. The threat is almost palpable, as Dillon is forced into a moral dilemma which leaves him absolutely nowhere to turn.

Written with the precision of detail that Moore 's readers expect from this consummate craftsman, the story builds with a breathtaking tension, as the starkest questions of right and wrong are confronted. Lies of Silence is not only Brian Moore's best novel to date, it is a culmination of an extraordinary literary career. It is, as well, all too crucially, a book for our times.

Publisher's Comments:

This comic novel won the 1990 Commonwealth Writers Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Moses Berger decides to write a history of the wealthy Gursky family in Canada , and traces it back to the mysterious Solomon's grandfather - a forger, Arctic explorer and self-styled rabbi.

Longlist information for 1990 is not available; the Booker Prize did not release longlists until 2001.

Sir Dennis Forman (Chair), Susannah Clapp, A. Walton Litz, Hilary Mantel, and Kate Saunders