Man Booker Prize Winners & Finalists (1995)

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Publisher's Comments:

Winner of Great Britain's highest literary award, the Booker Prize, The Ghost Road is the culminating masterpiece of Pat Barker's towering World War I fiction trilogy. The time of the novel is the closing months of the most senselessly savage of modern conflicts. In France , millions of men engaged in brutal trench warfare are all “ghosts in the making.” In England , psychologist William Rivers, with severe pangs of conscience, treats the mental casualties of the war to make them whole enough to fight again. Once of these, Billy Prior, risen to the officer class from the working class, both courageous and sardonic, decided to return to France with his fellow officer, poet Wilfrid Owen, to fight a war he no longer believes in. Meanwhile, Rivers, enfevered by influenza, returns in memory to his experience studying a South Pacific tribe whose ethos amounted to a culture of death. Across the gulf between his society and theirs, Rivers begins to form connections that cast new light on his—and our—understanding of war.

Combining poetic intensity with gritty realism, blending biting humor with tragic drama, moving toward a denouement as inevitable as it is devastating, The Ghost Road both encapsulates history and transcends it. It is a modern masterpiece.

Publisher's Comments:

With the brio and intelligence for which he has been so widely praised, Justin Cartwright captures the life of an apparently ordinary Englishman—his marriage, his work, his sexual relationships, and his connections to the events and sports of the world around him—until his day takes on the aspect first of a waking dream then of a true nightmare. Its horrifying conclusion, as Anthony Northleach runs into a South London prostitute, is shocking because the reader has come to see his story as both emblematic and savagely observant. Friendship, it seems, is all he has left.

Combining outastanding writing and unforgettable characters, In Every Face I Meet confirms Justin Cartwright's reputation as one of the most powerful contemporary novelists.

Publisher's Comments:

Booker Prize-winning author Salman Rushdie combines a ferociously witty family saga with a surreally imagined and sometimes blasphemous chronicle of modern India and flavors the mixture with peppery soliloquies on art, ethnicity, religious fanaticism, and the terrifying power of love. Moraes "Moor" Zogoiby, the last surviving scion of a dynasty of Cochinese spice merchants and crime lords, is also a compulsive storyteller and an exile. As he travels a route that takes him from India to Spain , he leaves behind a tale of mad passions and volcanic family hatreds, of titanic matriarchs and their mesmerized offspring, of premature deaths and curses that strike beyond the grave.

Publisher's Comments:

It is the late-fourteenth century, a time beset by war and plague. Nicholas Barber, a young and wayward cleric, stumbles across a group of travelling players and compounds his sins by joining them.

Yet the town where they perform reveals another drama: a young woman is to be hanged for the murder of a twelve-year-old boy. What better way to increase their takings than to make a new play, to enact the murder of Thomas Wells? But as the actors rehearse, they discover that the truth about the boy's death has yet to be revealed…

Publisher's Comments:

After traveling through Europe for two years, Scully and his wife Jennifer wind up in Ireland, and on a mystical whim of Jennifer's, buy an old farmhouse which stands in the shadow of a castle. While Scully spends weeks alone renovating the old house, Jennifer returns to Australia to liquidate their assets. When Scully arrives at Shannon Airport to pick up Jennifer and their seven-year-old daughter, Billie, it is Billie who emerges -- alone. There is no note, no explanation, not so much as a word from Jennifer, and the shock has left Billie speechless. In that instant, Scully's life falls to pieces.

The Riders is a superbly written and a darkly haunting story of a lovesick man in a vain search for a vanished woman. It is a powerfully accurate account of marriage today, of the demons that trouble relationships, of resurrection found in the will to keep going, in the refusal to hold on, to stand still. The Riders is also a moving story about the relationship between a loving man and his tough, bright daughter.

Longlist information for 1995 is not available; the Booker Prize did not release longlists until 2001.

George Walden, MP (Chair), Kate Kellaway, Peter Kemp, Adam Mars-Jones, and Ruth Rendell