Man Booker Prize Winners & Finalists (1994)

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Publisher's Comments:

A raw, wry vision of human survival in a bureaucratic world, How Late It Was, How Late opens one Sunday morning in Glasgow, Scotland, as Sammy, an ex-convict with a penchant for shoplifting, awakens in a lane and tries to remember the two-day drinking binge that landed him there. Then, things only get worse. Sammy gets in a fight with some soldiers, lands in jail, and discovers that he is completely blind. His girlfriend disappears, the police probe him endlessly, and his stab at Disability Compensation embroils him in the Kafkaesque red tape of the welfare system.

A masterpiece of black humor, subtle political parody, and Scottish lower-class vernacular How Late It Was, How Late is a classic-to-be from one of today's most talented novelists.

Publisher's Comments:

Thorfinn, a crofter's son living on the remote island of Norday , is a dreamy boy. “Idle and useless” according to his teachers. Bored by school, happier wandering the shores of his island home, he escapes into the limitless world of his imagination. Closing his eyes in the 1930s he dreams of crossing the “fish-fraught” ocean with Viking raiders. Falling asleep to the monotonous tones of a history lesson he finds himself running from the press gang into the arms of a beautiful seal-maiden who longs to return to the sea. War and adventure, the struggles of great men and the everyday toil of the fisherfolk, Thorfinn dreams the sweep of Norday's history, its life and its inevitable death…

Publisher's Comments:

Triton loved loving in Mister Salgado's house. It was the biggest house he had ever seen—filled with floors to sweep and silver to polish and meals to cook and adults to impress and a brilliant master whose voice was poetry. And people from all around came to the house—to sell their wares, to talk, to live, for this was where life took place. Even the sun would rise from the garage and sleep behind the del tree at night. And in the house life was good.

But beyond Mister Salgado's house there was a world. And all around them, it was falling apart.

Publisher's Comments:

A finalist for the 1994 Booker Prize, England 's highest honor for works of fiction, Paradise is at once the story of an African boy's coming of age, a tragic love story, and a tale of the corruption of African tradition by European civilization.

Sold by his father in repayment of a debt, twelve-year-old Yusuf is thrown from his simple rural life into the complexities of pre-colonial urban East Africa / Through Yusuf's eyes, Gurnah depicts communities at war, trading safaris gone awry, and the universal trials of adolescence. The result is a page-turning saga that offers a unique perspective on a seldom-chronicled part of the world.

Publisher's Comments:

Edward Manners—thirty-three, disaffected, in search of a new life—has come to an ancient Flemish city to teach English. Almost at once he falls in love with one of his pupils, the seventeen-year-old Luc Altidore, recently expelled from school for some mysterious offense. Condemned to a mounting but incommunicable obsession with the boy, Edward becomes involved in affairs with two other men: one a heartless but seductive fraud, the other a young drifter with a deeply possessive streak.

Then Edward is introduced to the world of the enigmatic and reclusive Symbolist painter Edgard Orst. Gradually he is drawn toward an understanding of the artist's own obsession with a famous actress, drowned off Ostend at the turn of the century, and of the ambiguous circumstances of Orst's own death under Nazi occupation.

The events of The Folding Star are played out amid the silent streets and canals of a city that seems locked in the past, and across the northern landscape of out-of-season resorts and abandoned houses that lies beyond. But in the central panel of the novels triptych Edward returns home for a funeral and is caught up in memories of his own late adolescence and his first love affair: an English pastoral already threatened by the experience of betrayal and loss.

This brilliant book confirms Alan Hollinghurst's stature as one of the finest novelists now writing in English.

Publisher's Comments:

A fable set on a mythical island at the time of the Inquisition in which two young outcasts, captured separately, are brought before the cardinal prince of the island. The first is a wild, flesh-eating wolf child and the second is a foreign prince who has proclaimed his disbelief in God. The fate of the prince will depend on the wolf girl--who is being educated in a nunnery, where her caretakers have been ordered to teach her to speak but not to speak of God--and the answer she gives when the cardinal asks her if God exists. The two prisoners are used as pawns by the religious council to answer the question of whether or not believing in God is an inherent part of being human.

Longlist information for 1994 is not available; the Booker Prize did not release longlists until 2001.

Professor John Bailey (Chair), Rabbi Julia Newberger, Dr. Alastair Niven, Alan Taylor, and James Wood