Man Booker Prize Winners & Finalists (1997)

Planning to read all of the Booker books?  Download the TurboBookSnob's Tracking Sheet - it contains a complete list of all of the nominated books, with space to track your progress and comments.

   Tracking Sheet

Publisher's Comments:

Southern India 1969. Here, armed only with the invincible innocence of children, Rahel and Esthappen fashion a childhood for themselves in the shade of the wreck that is their family: their lonely, lovely mother, who loves by night the same man her children adore by day...their blind grandmother, who plays Handel on her violin...their beloved uncle, A Rhodes Scholar pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher...their enemy, an ex-nun and incumbent grandaunt...and the ghost of an imperial entomologist's moth. But when their English cousin and her mother arrive for a Christmas visit, the twins learn that things can change in an instant, that lives can twist into new, ugly shapes, even cease forever. The brilliantly plotted story uncoils with an agonizing sense of foreboding and inevitability. Yet nothing prepares you for what lies at the heart of it.

Publisher's Comments:

Winner of the Whitbread Novel of the Year and a Booker finalist: a controversial novel of faith and mystery about a group of desert travellers and their encounter with Jesus

Quarantine is Jim Crace's imaginative and powerful retelling of Christ's fabled 40-day fast in the desert. In Crace's account, Jesus travels to a cluster of arid caves where he crosses paths with a small group of exiles who are on a pilgrimage to find redemption. One wealthy and manipulative quarantine recognizes characteristics in Christ that he believes are divine. Evoking the strangeness and beauty of the desert landscape, Crace provocatively interprets one of our most important stories.

Publisher's Comments:

“Since I was a boy I have periodically suffered from the irrational fear that I am on the verge of fatal collapse. I think I am right in saying that it is my mind which is chiefly to blame.”

So writes the Duke of Portland in the pages of the title The Underground Man , Mick Jackson's dazzling fictional portrait inspired by Victorian England's famous eccentric, best-known for the labyrinth of tunnels he built underneath his estate. Through journal entries, the novel reveals a sweet, strange man, a true naïf, a fount of nineteenth century curiosity, and an inspired hypochondriac. His attempts to alleviate the indigestion, aches, and pains of old age send him to the fields of chiropractic medicine, archaeology, phrenology, and the study of auras in a series of hilarious episodes touched by wistfulness ( “Why no manual?” That is my plea. “Why no instructions?” ). The Duke's enthusiasms gradually turned inward, from the mysteries of the body to those of the mind – and of memory. The end of his journey will pierce you through with horror and grief.

Publisher's Comments:

The award-winning Grace Notes is a compact and altogether masterful portrait of a woman composer and the complex interplay between her life and her art. With superb artistry and startling intimacy, it brings us into the life of Catherine McKenna -- estranged daughter, vexed lover, new mother, and musician making her mark in a male-dominated field. It is a book that the Virginia Woolf of A Room of One's Own would instantly understand.

Publisher's Comments:

Jerry Marlow sits slightly off-center on the long back seat of the bus on his way from Milan to Strausbourg and reflects on the mess that is his life: a failed marriage, a wayward daughter, and a lover whose impact was probably more damaging than surgery. Even his professorship is on the line. Marlow's biting scalped sharp commentary on the situation is barely sufficient to drag him through the labyrinthine madness. What lies in wait around the next bend? There are times when the most appalling premonitions seem all too plausible, yet the pull of hope cannot be resisted. Europa is a decidedly adult road novel with a rich international gallery of characters. It offers an explosive, sometimes hilarious portrait of a man patching himself together on a continent whose rhetoric of unity is less convincing – and far less exciting – than its bizarre polyglot passions and ancient conflicts.

Publisher's Comments:

Nicola may be shouldn't have stepped out to buy that pack of cigarettes, because the man she discovers in her living room when she returns is not the adorable, straightforward, devoted Jonathan with whom she has been sharing her life, and flat, for the past six years. That Jonathan would never have simply, unilaterally, decided that she should, as he abruptly put it, “move out.”

So it is that a shocked, grief-stricken Nicola packs her bags and sets out bravely on the bumpy course that will take her from the hellish end of an affair to the essence of the thing. So, too, does Booker Prize-nominee Madeleine St. John with comic vision provide a rare glimpse into the challenging nature of the human heart.

Longlist information for 1997 is not available; the Booker Prize did not release longlists until 2001.

Professor Gillian Beer (Chair), Rachel Billington, Jason Cowley, Jan Dalley, and Professor Dan Jacobson