Man Booker Prize Winners & Finalists (1996)

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Publisher's Comments:

Four men -- friends, most of them, for half a lifetime -- gather in a London pub. They have taken it upon themselves to carry out the "last orders" of Jack Dodds, master butcher, and carry his ashes to the sea. And as they drive to the coast in the Mercedes that Jack's adopted son Vince has borrowed from his car dealership, their errand becomes an epic journey into their collective and individual pasts.

Braiding these men's voices -- and that of Jack's mysteriously absent widow -- into a choir of secret sorrow and resentment, passion and regret, Graham Swift creates a work that is at once intricate and honest, tender and profanely funny; in short, Last Orders is a triumph.

Publisher's Comments:

In Alias Grace Margaret Atwood takes us back in time and into the life of one of the most enigmatic and notorious women of the nineteenth century. Grace Marks has been convicted for her involvement in the vicious murders of her employer, the wealthy Thomas Kinnear, and of Nancy Montgomery, his housekeeper and mistress. Some believe Grace is innocent; others think her evil or insane. Now serving a life sentence after a stint in Toronto 's lunatic asylum, Grace herself claims to have no memory of the murders. Dr. Simon Jordan, an up-and-coming expert in the burgeoning field of mental illness, is engaged by a group of reformers and spiritualists who seek a pardon for Grace. He listens to her story while bringing her closer and closer to the day she cannot remember. What will he find in attempting to unlock her memories? Is Grace female fiend? A bloodthirsty femme fatale? Or is she the victim of circumstances?

Publisher's Comments:

The sinking of the world's greatest luxury liner, the invincible and magnificent SS Titanic , has captured people's attention ever since that tragic April night in 1912 when 1500 people lost their lives. And no one has better dramatized this memorable event than Beryl Bainbridge in her latest novel.

Publisher's Comments:

Set in post-war Northern Ireland , where the unquiet ghosts of the Troubles walk alongside the warriors and changelings of Celtic legend, Seamus Deane's first novel is the transfixing story of a boy trying to uncover the secrets of the adult world. And in Reading in the Dark , every adult has a secret—of family feuds and political treachery, unexplained disappearances and unsolved murders, and of sorrow so bitter that it is passed down through generations.

Deane's unnamed narrator searches for the truth amid a forest of rumors and legends: of an uncle who may have died a hero of the IRA or absconded to America; of a grandfather who may have killed one man and ordered the deaths of many more; of a child who comes back from the grave and of two others who vanish into one amid an unholy blaze of greenish light. As orchestrated by Deane, these events coalesce into a work of unforgettable power, written in ravishing prose and overflowing with tenderness, sadness, menace, and dark wit.

Publisher's Comments:

Set in an English village where the charm of the local landscape contrasts sharply with the prejudices and vagaries of its adult inhabitants. The Orchard on Fire richly relates the coming-of-age of young April Harlency.

Shortly after the Harlency family arrives in Stonebridge to run the Copper Kettle Team-room, April meets the energetic carrottop Ruby Richards, and the two girls become fast friends. Though April increasingly becomes the unwitting object of lonely Mr. Greenridge's overtures and Ruby regularly sports bruises or black eyes, courtesy of her brutish father, the girls retain the unassailable spirit of children who fully experience their lives but only half understand them. Together, they retreat from the confusion of the village and transform an abandoned railway car in an orchard into their secret hideaway, an idyllic camp of shared dreams.

Publisher's Comments:

With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall the work of Charles Dickens, this magnificent novel captures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India . The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers — a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the caste violence of their native village — will be thrust together, forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain future.

As the characters move from distrust to friendship and from friendship to love, A Fine Balance creates an enduring panorama of the human spirit in an inhuman state.

Longlist information for 1996 is not available; the Booker Prize did not release longlists until 2001.

Carmen Callil (Chair), Jonathan Coe, Iain Jack, A.L. Kennedy, and A.N. Wilson