Man Booker Prize Winners & Finalists (2000)

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Publisher's Comments:

The Blind Assassin opens with these simple, resonant words: Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge. They are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sister's death in 1945 is followed by an inquest report proclaiming the death accidental. But just as the reader expects to settle into Laura's story, Atwood introduces a novel-within-a-novel. Entitled The Blind Assassin , it is a science fiction story told by two unnamed lovers who meet in dingy backstreet rooms. When we return to Iris, it is through a 1947 newspaper article announcing the discovery of a sailboat carrying the dead body of her husband, a distinguished industrialist. Brilliantly weaving together such seemingly disparate elements, Atwood creates a world of astonishing vision and unforgettable impact.

Publisher's Comments:

This exceptional novel about family, love, and the innocence and terror of childhood was one of the most applauded and auspicious debuts of the last year. Compared by reviewers to Angela's Ashes and Wuthering Heights, The Hiding Place was the only debut work to be shortlisted for England's prestigious Booker Prize -- in the company of Kazuo Ishiguro and Margaret Atwood -- and went on to become a universally praised U.S. national best-seller. Set in a Maltese immigrant community in Cardiff , Wales , and peopled with sharp-edged, luminously drawn characters, The Hiding Place is the story of Frankie Gauci, his wife, Mary, and their six daughters. With her "unusual gift for letting her characters' interior lives come forth" (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution), Azzopardi chronicles Frankie's unforgivable betrayal: gambling away his family's livelihood and eventually the family itself. The Gaucis' story is seen through the eyes of Dolores, the youngest daughter and the embodiment of bad luck in her father's estimation, condemned to bear the mark of a family that is rapidly singeing at the edges. Dolores presents an unsparing portrayal of the fear and hopelessness of childhood amid grim poverty and neglect, of children growing up without safety nets and on sunken foundations. Sustained by a tightrope tension and a stark, youthful wisdom, The Hiding Place conjures the coarse sensuality of life among the docks, the smoky cafes and bars, the crumbling homes and gambling rooms of Tiger Bay . "Astonishing and iridescent" (The Times, London), The Hiding Place is a mesmerizing exploration of how family, like fire, can shift suddenly from something that provides light and warmth to a dangerous conflagration, sparing no one in its path. "A harrowing and remarkably self-assured first novel [that] possesses all the immediacy and emotional power of a memoir...." -- Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

Publisher's Comments:

The last of a manufacturing dynasty in a dying industrial town, Bill lives alone in the family mansion and works for the Truth, the moribund local paper. He yearns to write long philosophical pieces about the American dream gone sour, not the flaccid write-ups of bake-off contests demanded by the Truth. Then, old man Lawton goes missing, and suspicion fixes on his son, Ronny. Paradoxically, the specter of violent death breathes new life into the town. For Bill, a deeper and more disturbing involvement with the Lawtons ensues. The Lawton murder and the obsessions it awakes in the town come to symbolize the mood of a nation on the edge. Compulsively readable, The Keepers of Truth startles both with its insights and with Collins's powerful, incisive writing.

Publisher's Comments:

The maze of human memory –the ways in which we accommodate and alter it, deceive and deliver ourselves with it – is territory that Kazuo Ishiguro has made his own. In his previous novels. He has explored this inner world and its manifestations in the lives of his characters with rare inventiveness and subtlety, shrewd humor and insight. In When We Were Orphans , his first novel in five years, he returns to this terrain in a brilliantly realized story that illuminates the power of one's past to determine the present.

The story is straightforward. It's telling is remarkable. Christopher's voice is controlled, detailed, and detached, it's precision unsurprising in someone who has devoted his life to the examination of details and the rigors of objective thought. But within the layers of his narrative is slowly revealed what he can't, or won't, see: that his memory, despite what he wants to believe, is not unaffected by his childhood tragedies; that his powers of perception, the heralded clarity of his vision, can be blinding as well as enlightening; and that the simplest desires – a child's for his parents, a man's for understanding – may give rise to the most complicated truths.

Publisher's Comments:

When Captain Illiam Quillian Kewley and his band of rum smugglers from the Isle of Man have most of their contraband – but not all – confiscated by British Customs, they are forced to put their ship Sincerity up for charter. The only takers are two eccentric Englishmen who want to embark for the other side of the globe.

The Reverend Geoffrey Wilson believes the Garden of Eden was on the island of Tasmania . His traveling partner, Doctor Thomas Potter, unbeknownst to Wilson , is developing a revolutionary and sinister theory of his own, about the races of men. And these passengers are perhaps only slightly more odd than the crew itself, a diverse and lively bunch better equipped to entertain one another than to steer Sincerity around Cape Horn and across the Indian Ocean . Yet they set sail, pointed southward, and bound for a thrilling, epic romp across the high seas and cultures of the nineteenth century.

Meanwhile, an aboriginal in Tasmania named Peevay recounts his people's struggles against the invading British, who prove as lethal in their good intentions as in their cruelty. This is no Eden but a world of hunting parties and colonial ethnic cleansing. As the English passengers haplessly approach Peevay's land, their bizarre notions ever more painfully at odds with reality, we know a mighty collision is looming.

Full of dangerous humor, English Passengers combines wit, adventure, and harrowing historical detail in a mesmerizing display of storytelling. Narrated by over twenty different characters, each one so distinct that the reader has the sense of a story not so much told as dazzlingly peopled, Matthew Kneale has created a buoyant tale, beautifully presented in a storm of voices that brings a past age to vivid and memorable life.

Publisher's Comments:

The engrossing story of an isolated mountain village in County Kerry where all the women are mysteriously dying, leaving the priest, Father McGreevy, to cope with insoluble problems. He struggles to preserve what remains of his parish, against the rough mountain elements and the grief and superstitions of his people, and the growing distrust of the town below. Filled with grace and poetry yet exploring the locus of misfortune and the very nature of evil.

Longlist information for 2000 is not available; the Booker Prize did not release longlists until 2001.

Simon Jenkins (Chair), Professor Roy Foster, Mariella Frostrup, Caroline Gascoigne, and Dr. Rose Tremain