Man Booker Prize Winners & Finalists (1992)

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Publisher's Comments:

The Booker Prize-winning novel, now a critically acclaimed major motion picture, starring Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, Willem Dafoe and Kristin Scott Thomas. With ravishing beauty and unsettling intelligence, Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. Hana, the exhausted nurse; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burned man who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal, and rescue illuminates this book like flashes of heat lightening.

Publisher's Comments:

Sacred Hunger is a stunning and engrossing exploration of power, domination, and greed. Filled with the “sacred hunger” to expand its empire and its profits, England entered fully into the slave trade and spread the trade throughout its colonies. In this Booker Prize-winning work, Barry Unsworth follows the failing fortunes of William Kemp, a merchant pinning his last chance to a slave ship; his son who needs a fortune because he is in love with an upper-class woman; and his nephew who sails on the ship as its doctor because he has lost all he has loved. The voyage meets its demise when disease spreads among the slaves and the captain's dramatic response provokes a mutiny. Joining together, the sailors and the slaves set up a secret, utopian society in the wilderness of Florida , only to await the vengeance of the single-minded young Kemp.

Publisher's Comments:

Old Max, the giant of Serenity House, North London 's "Premier Eventide Refuge", might have been left to die in peace. But his son-in-law Albert, an MP with an interest in the new War Crimes Bill, has other ideas. This book was nominated for the 1992 Booker Prize.

Publisher's Comments:

Welcome to the mind if Francie Brady. Just what Francie did to Mrs. Nugent is the final, terrifying act at the end of a relentless descent into a world of scorn and fear.

Francie Brady, the “pig boy,” is growing up in a poor small Irish town in the early sixties, fueled on an adolescent's comic books, Flash Bars, and the Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea . He is determined to win the Francie Brady Not a Bad Bastard Anymore Diploma . But how do you do that when your mother is sent to the madhouse, your father is an alcoholic, and everyone turns their back on you?

When The Butcher Boy appeared in England it immediately caused a literary sensation, and confirmed that Bill Buford had written earlier in Granta—that Patrick McCabe is “one of the most promising writers in a long, long time.” Not only was The Butcher Boy nominated for, and the winner of, major literary prizes, but McCabe's theatrical adaptation of the novel, Frank Pig Says Hello , was staged in Dublin with tremendous success, and a production is now planned for London's Royal Court theater.

Publisher's Comments:

In 1946, a young couple set off on their honeymoon. Fired by their ideals and passion for one another, they plan an idyllic holiday, only to encounter an experience of darkness so terrifying it alters their lives forever. In this highly praised national bestseller, Ian McEwan has written his most humane and compelling novel to date.'

Publisher's Comments:

A Booker Prize Finalist, Daughters of the House is Michèle Roberts's acclaimed novel of secrets and lies revealed in the aftermath of World War II. Thérèse and Léonie, French and English cousins of the same age, grow up together in Normandy . Intrigued by parents' and servants' guilty silences and the broken shrine they find in the woods, the girls weave their own elaborate fantasies, unwittingly revealing the village secret and a deep shame that will haunt them in their adult lives.

Longlist information for 1992 is not available; the Booker Prize did not release longlists until 2001.

Victoria Glendinning (Chair), John Coldstream, Valentine Cunningham, Dr. Harriet Harvey Wood, and Mark Lawson