Man Booker Prize Winners & Finalists (1993)

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Publisher's Comments:

It is 1968. Patrick Clarke is ten. He loves Geronimo, the Three Stooges, and the smell of his hot water bottle. He can't stand his little brother Sinbad. His best friend is Kevin, and their names are all over Barrytown, written with sticks in wet cement. They play football, lepers, and jumping to the bottom of the sea. But why didn't anyone help him when Charles Levy had been going to kill him? Why do his ma and da argue so much, but act like everything is fine? Paddy sees everything, but he understands less and less. Hilarious and poignant, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha charts the triumphs, indignities, and bewilderment of a young boy and his world, a place full of warmth, cruelty, confusion, and love.

Publisher's Comments:

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Under the Frog follows the adventures of two young Hungarian basketball players through the turbulent years between the end of World War II and the anti-Soviet uprising of 1956. In this spirited indictment of totalitarianism, the two improbable heroes, Pataki and Gyuri, travel the length and breadth of Hungary in an epic quest for food, lodging, and female companionship.

Publisher's Comments:

Scar Tissue is a bold and uncompromising report from that other country called illness. At its heart is a son's account of his mother's voyage into the world of neurological disease, where she loses first her memory, and then her very identity, only to gain—at the end—a strange serenity.

As the son tells his mother's story, he grows obsessed by his mother's transformation beyond her self, and sets out on his own quest for self-discovery—a quest which can end only when he has discarded everything he has ever believed to be true.

Scar Tissue is an immensely powerful novel about love and the acceptance of loss; it looks at questions of selfhood and selfishness, and records, in language of painful and memorable precision, the struggle of a mother and son to survive forgetfulness and destruction.

Publisher's Comments:

In this rich and compelling novel, written in language of astonishing poise and resonance, one of Australia's greatest living writers gives and immensely powerful vision of human differences and eternal divisions. In the mid-1840s a thirteen-year-old British cabin boy, Gemmy Fairley, is cast ashore in the far north of Australia and taken in by aborigines. Sixteen years later he moves back into the world of Europeans, among hopeful yet terrified settlers who are staking out their small patch of home in an alien place. To them, Gemmy stands as a different kind of challenge: he is a force that at once fascinates and repels. His own identity in this new world is as unsettling to him as the knowledge he brings to others of the savage, the aboriginal.

Publisher's Comments:

From the acclaimed author of Cambridge comes an ambitious, formally inventive, and intensely moving evocation of the scattered offspring of Africa . It begins in a year of failing crops and desperate foolishness, which forces a father to sell his three children into slavery. Employing a brilliant range of voices and narrative techniques, Caryl Phillips follows these exiles across the river that separates continents and centuries.

Phillips's characters include a freed slave who journeys to Liberia as a missionary in the 1830s; a pioneer woman seeking refuge from the white man's justice on the Colorado frontier; and an African-American G.I. who falls in love with a white Englishwoman during World War II. Together these voices make up a "many-tongued chorus" of common memory—and one of the most stunning works of fiction ever to address the lives of black people severed from their homeland.

Publisher's Comments:

From her calamitous birth in Manitoba in 1905 to her journey with her father to Indiana , throughout her years as a wife, mother, and widow, Daisy Goodwill has struggled to understand her place in her own life. Now she listens, she observes, and through sheer force of imagination, she becomes a witness of her own life: her birth, her death, and the troubling misconnections she discovers in between. With irony and humor, Carol Shields weaves together the poignant story of this twentieth-century pilgrim in search of herself, and in doing so, creates a story that is a paradigm of the unsettled decades of our era.

Longlist information for 1993 is not available; the Booker Prize did not release longlists until 2001.

Lord Gowrey (Chair), Professor Gillian Beer, Anne Chisholm, Nicholas Clee, and Olivier Todd