Man Booker Prize Winners & Finalists (1998)

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Publisher's Comments:

On a chilly February day, two old friends meet in the throng outside a London crematorium to pay their last respects to Molly Lane . Both Clive Linley and Vernon Halliday had been Molly's lovers in the days before they reached their current eminence: Clive is Britain 's most successful modern composer, and Vernon is editor of the newspaper The Judge . Gorgeous, feisty Molly had other lovers, too, notably Julian Garmony, Foreign Secretary, a notorious right-winger tipped to be the next prime minister.

In the days that follow Molly's funeral, Clive and Vernon will make a pact with consequences that neither could have foreseen. Each will make a disastrous moral decision, their friendship will be tested to its limits, and Julian Garmony will be fighting for his political life. A sharp contemporary morality tale, cleverly disguised as a comic novel, Amsterdam is "as sheerly enjoyable a book as one is likely to pick up this year" ( The Washington Post Book World ).

Publisher's Comments:

Master Georgie—George Hardy, a surgeon and amateur photographer—stands at the center of this intense, searing, unsettling novel that takes him from a comfortable life in prosperous nineteenth century Liverpool to the battlefield at Inkerman and the horrors of the Crimean War. His story begins and ends in front of a camera, but Master Georgie is more than the subject of a photograph.

Three voices record the series of strange events, bad judgments, good intentions, and ill luck that shape the destiny of Master Georgie. There is Myrtle, a foundling rescued by an accident of fate that secures her an ambiguous position in the Hardy household. There is Pompey Jones, a resourceful street boy, then a fire-eater, and finally a photographer's assistant. There is the pompous, melancholy Dr. Potter who studies the classics and the new science of Darwin no less than he ponders the singular misadventure in a Liverpool brothel that has so ominously linked his fortune with that of a servant girl, a scamp, and his brother-in-law, Master Georgie.

Disclosures of the troubled and enigmatic Master Georgie's hidden life unfold in the course of the eight=year journey that ultimately exposes him and his unlikely companions to the grim experiences of epidemic cholera, military slaughter, and surgical butchery. On November 5, 1854 , on a battlefield, where, after only seven hours, the battle for the Crimea is lost and won, that journey ends.

Publisher's Comments:

Imagine an England where all the pubs are quaint, where the Windsors behave themselves (mostly), where the cliffs of Dover are actually white, and where Robin Hood and his merry men really are merry. This is precisely what visionary tycoon Sir Jack Pitman seeks to accomplish on the Isle of Wight , a “destination” where tourists can find replicas of Big Ben (half size), Princess Di's grave, and even Harrod's (conveniently located inside the Tower of London ).

Martha Cochrane, hired as one of Sir Jack's resident “no-people,” ably assists him in realizing his dream. But when this land of make-believe gradually gets horribly and hilariously out of hand, Martha develops her own vision of the perfect England . Julian Barnes delights us with a novel that is at once a philosophical inquiry, a burst of mischief, and a moving elegy about authenticity and nationality.

Publisher's Comments:

The Industry of Souls is the story of Alexander Bayliss, a British citizen who was wrongfully arrested for espionage by the KGB in the 1950s and was sentenced to 25 years of hard labor in the work camps of Siberia . Eventually freed in the 1970s, he decides not to return to the West - a world he barely remembers and to which he no longer belongs - and instead finds his way to a small Russian village where he becomes a much beloved school master.

Now, on the day of his 80th birthday, communism has evaporated and Russia is changed. This moving story weaves from this momentous day to his harrowing past in the camp and his life in the village. And in the end, he is presented with a choice, perhaps for the first time in his life...

Martin Booth's brilliantly crafted novel is a celebration of life in the face of death, of humanity in the midst of a system that robs men of their dignity. It stands as a mature and profound exploration of the meaning of freedom and the essence of human friendship.

Publisher's Comments:

Patrick McCabe blew critics and readers away with his novel The Butcher Boy , the story of Francie Brady, a working-class boy in Northern Ireland whose life becomes a violent storm. That novel won the 1992 Irish Times-Aer Lingus Award and was nominated for Britain 's Booker Prize. McCabe has returned to Northern Ireland with his new novel, Breakfast on Pluto , which in its own zany way is an Irish Breakfast at Tiffany 's, with a goodly dose of "The Crying Game" thrown in. Starring Patrick "Pussy" Braden, a woman in a man's body who knows how to make magic in the squalid world around her, Breakfast on Pluto is a literary event. McCabe is truly coming into his own, and this new book is wild and wonderful.

Publisher's Comments:

This award-winning literary tour de force, shortlisted for both the Whitbread and the Booker prizes, tells the captivating tale of three men: Tam and Richie, good Scots lads at heart who have turned loafing into an art form, and their ever exasperated English foreman. Carefully laid plans go haywire from the start, and as they cover their tracks the best they can, the hapless trio heads south from Scotland to do a job in England , where they find that their reputation has preceded them, to say the least.

Longlist information for 1998 is not available; the Booker Prize did not release longlists until 2001.

Douglas Hurd (Chair), Professor Valentine Cunningham, Penelope Fitzgerald, Miriam Gross, and Nigella Lawson