Man Booker Prize Winners & Finalists (2001)

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Publisher's Comments:

Out of nineteenth-century Australia rides a hero of his people and a man for all nations, in this masterpiece by the Booker Prize-winning author of Oscar and Lucinda and Jack Maggs. Exhilarating, hilarious, panoramic, and immediately engrossing, it is also — at a distance of many thousand miles and more than a century — a Great American Novel.

This is Ned Kelly's true confession, in his own words and written on the run for an infant daughter he has never seen. To the authorities, this son of dirt-poor Irish immigrants was a born thief and, ultimately, a cold-blooded murderer; to most other Australians, he was a scapegoat and patriot persecuted by "English" landlords and their agents.

With his brothers and two friends, Kelly eluded a massive police manhunt for twenty months, living by his wits and strong heart, supplementing his bushwhacking skills with ingenious bank robberies while enjoying the support of most everyone not in uniform. He declined to flee overseas when he could, bound to win his jailed mother's freedom by any means possible, including his own surrender. In the end, however, she served out her sentence in the same Melbourne prison where, in 1880, her son was hanged.

Still his country's most powerful legend, Ned Kelly is here chiefly a man in full: devoted son, loving husband, fretful father, and loyal friend, now speaking as if from the grave. With this mythic outlaw and the story of his mighty travails and exploits, and with all the force of a classic Western, Peter Carey has breathed life into a historical figure who transcends all borders and embodies tragedy, perseverance, and freedom.

Publisher's Comments:

Ian McEwan, Booker Prize-winning author of Amsterdam , has created a symphonic novel of love and war, childhood and class, guilt and forgiveness that provides all the satisfaction of a brilliant narrative combined with the provocation we have come to expect from this master of English prose.

On a hot summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses a moment's flirtation between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant and Cecilia's childhood friend. But Briony's incomplete grasp of adult motives — together with her precocious literary gifts — forces a situation that will change the course of their lives. As it follows that event's repercussions through the chaos and carnage of World War II and into the close of the twentieth century, Atonement engages the reader on every conceivable level, with an ease and authority that mark it as a genuine masterpiece.

Publisher's Comments:

It is the summer of 1997. Alec Valentine is returning to England to care for his ailing mother, Alice , a task that only reinforces his deep sense of inadequacy. In San Francisco , his older brother Larry prepares to come home as well, preoccupied with an acting career that is sliding toward sleaze and a marriage that is faltering. In Paris, on the other hand, the Hungarian playwright Laszlo Lazar seems to have it all--critical acclaim, a loving boyfriend, and a close circle of friends--yet even he is haunted by guilt and tragedy. For each of them the time has come to assess the turns taken, the opportunities missed. And for each there will be one last chance to break free from the past and find redemption in a moment of clarity and courage. Andrew Miller has given us an intimate, compelling meditation that evokes an extraordinary range of emotions and insights--Oxygen lives and breathes beyond the final page.

Publisher's Comments:

Number9Dream is the international literary sensation from a writer with astonishing range and imaginative energy—an intoxicating ride through Tokyo 's dark underworlds and the even more mysterious landscapes of our collective dreams.

David Mitchell follows his eerily precocious, globe-striding first novel, Ghostwritten , with a work that is in its way even more ambitious. In outward form, Number9Dream is a Dickensian coming-of-age journey: Young dreamer Fiji Miyake, from remote rural Japan, thrust out on his own by his sister's death and his mother's breakdown, comes to Tokyo in pursuit of the father who abandoned him. Stumbling around this strange, awesome city, he trips over and crosses—through a hidden destiny or just monstrously bad luck—a number of its secret power centers. Suddenly, the riddle of his father's identity becomes just one of the increasingly urgent questions Fiji must answer. Why is the line between the world of his experiences and the world of his dreams so blurry? Why do so many horrible things keep happening to him? What is it about the number 9? To answer these questions, and ultimately to come to terms with his inheritance, Fiji must somehow acquire an insight into the workings of history and fate that would be rare in anyone, much less in a boy from out of town with a price on his head and less than the cost of a Beatles disc to his name.

Publisher's Comments:

Rachel Sifter's absorbing, internationally acclaimed debut explores the modern German psyche through the experiences of three ordinary people.

At the onset of World War II, a young photographer's assistant is kept out of the war due to a physical disability, and instead spends his time capturing on film the changing temper of Berlin , the city he loves. Just weeks after Germany 's surrender, a teenage girl whose parents have been taken into allied custody leads her siblings on a harrowing journey to find their grandmother. And two generations after the war, a teacher searches for the reason why the Russians imprisoned his beloved grandfather. Evoking the experiences of the individual with astonishing emotional depth and psychological acuity, The Dark Room develops a portrait of the twentieth century in all its drama and complexity.

Publisher's Comments:

Five people: four are living; three are strangers; two are sisters; one, a teenage hotel chambermaid, has fallen to her death in a dumbwaiter. But her spirit lingers in the world, straining to recall things she never knew. And one night all five women find themselves in the smooth, plush environs of the Global Hotel, where the intersection of their very different fates makes for this playful, defiant, and richly inventive novel.

Forget room service: this is a riotous elegy, a deadpan celebration of colliding worlds, and a spirited defense of love. Blending incisive wit with surprising compassion, Hotel World is a wonderfully invigorating, life-affirming book.

Publisher's Comments:

Dr Johnson, having completed his life's major work (the first ever Dictionary of the English Language) is running an increasingly chaotic life, torn between his strict morality and his undeclared passion for Mrs Thrale, the wife of an old friend. Her daughter, Queeney, narrates.

Publisher's Comments:

A critically acclaimed, Booker longlisted novel that is reminiscent of Pat Barker's 'Regeneration Trilogy'. Clarice Pike and Vic Warren are from completely different backgrounds. An impossible affair has already driven them thousands of miles apart. 1939 finds Clarice in Malaya where her father is an obscure company doctor, and Vic in East London, an unemployed shipwright badly married to Phylis, Clarice's cousin. As their feelings conspire to draw the lovers back together, the world erupts with a terrible violence. It is the relentlessness of male brutality that forces Vic to grope towards what real manhood might be. If the Invader Comes combines themes from Derek Beaven's previously acclaimed Newton's Niece and Acts of Mutiny to portray a wartime England where human relationships are threatened as much from within the family as from occupied Europe. Exciting, moving and ultimately optimistic, Derek Beaven's new novel represents a daring leap in British Fiction.

Publisher's Comments:

Joe Richardson is getting to know his father, who recently returned from the war and is trying to rebuild his own identity as well as shape that of his son. Joe is the most important thing to his parents but can they put him on the path to happiness when they're not sure how to be happy themselves?

Publisher's Comments:

Shamrock Tea is an Irish drug that enables its users to see things not given to ordinary mortals. They can sense colours and sounds more vividly; they can penetrate the surface of paintings; they can cross time. The narrator, his cousin and a strange Belgian friend know that their lives are ruled mysteriously by the great van Eyck painting, The Arnolfini Portrait, and they have travelled in dream like moments through the painting into other times. They discover that each moment is connected to every other. But in the strange world of Shamrock Tea, no story can be straightforward. With a cast of characters that includes the gardener Ludwig Wittgenstein, this book will blow your mind.

Publisher's Comments:

Michael Quantz transiently haunted the lakeside, pausing, screwing up his eyes against the sheen of grey light. Waves spilt at his feet, drizzle fell with calm steadiness, and he found himself at a standstill.
One rarely indulged the luxury of thought nowadays. All did without sleep, catnapping in odd half-hours or getting caught short, jerking to unconsciousness with a mouthful of sourness, a staleness of cigarette smoke, lungs coated in a raw residue of tar, sweat caking the body within its uniform. Jolted awake, there was surprise at having been taken by the permanently denied sleep, which stalked like a predatory lover to whom no upright man should surrender.

Publisher's Comments:

When Julie Summers' car breaks down in a sleazy street, a young Arab mechanic comes to her rescue. Out of this meeting develops a friendship that turns to love. But soon, despite his attempts to make the most of Julie's wealthy connections, Abdu is deported from South Africa and Julie insists on going too - but the couple must marry to make the relationship legitimate in the traditional village which is to be their home. Here, whilst Abdu is dedicated to escaping back to the different life he has discovered, Julie finds herself slowly drawn in by the charm of her surroundings and new family, creating an unexpected gulf between them...

Publisher's Comments:

Set in a rural Maori coastal community, the humour and aroha of the community are powerful life preserving factors. But there is conflict in the whanau. Te Rua is battling for custody of his daughter against his two aunts. But why are they disputing custody and what is really going on?

Publisher's Comments:

A stunning and elegiac look at a world where imperialism has opened up boundaries, only to close off borders. Powerful and profound, it reveals an author at the height of his powers.

Publisher's Comments:

According to her own moral calculations, Katie Carr has earned her affair. She's a doctor, and doctors are decent people, and her husband David is the "Angriest Man" in Holloway. When David suddenly becomes good, Katie's sums no longer add up, and she is forced to ask herself some questions.

Publisher's Comments:

Set in wartime and post-war England Wolfy and the strudelbakers is a comic take on the disaster zone of displacement and exile. Wolfy lives with the 'strudelbakers' - his super-critical aunt and melancholy uncle - in the surrealistic world of refugees who have been granted shelter in wartime England. He is an expert at living in two worlds - the chaotic and dark world of uprooted, displaced people desperately hanging on to their Jewish religion - and the world of vitality, variety and temptation he finds in London's streets. Wolfy observes it all with a sharp eye; the bafflement of his English neighbours at the odd, secretive world of his Jewish family and their comical habits as they reluctantly learn to stop being 'aliens' and discover England through blitz, evacuation, menial work, school reports, team sports and Christmas. Yet for Wolfy this is the new and exciting world. He is a success as a budding Englishman. He lives near Arsenal Football Club, practises ballroom dancing with the help of the BBC and, of course, he is getting ready for girls. This wonderful novel is an enchanting blend of humour and crisp observation. A mix that gives it a rich and unusual flavour - the flavour of real strudel: complex, succulent and full of goodies.

Publisher's Comments:

Since the publication of How late it was how late, James Kelman has been working on Translated Accounts. The novel is set in an unnamed territory or country that appears to be under military rule. It is narrative in the first person, but the narrators remain anonymous, as do most of the other characters. The language used is an atypical English form, but akin to the basic translation that might appear within a department of an overseas 'foreign office'. Perhaps someone transcribed first-hand accounts of certain incidents, events and states of mind, as narrated by participants in the struggle and then passed on the transcriptions for translation; or perhaps the accounts were simply translated first hand into English and edited later. In either case the results were dispatched to a more senior civil servant who later handed them over to an appropriate state agency.

Publisher's Comments:

On the morning of the 13th November 1952, the body of 19-year-old Patricia Curran was carried into the surgery belonging to the family doctor. At first Dr Kenneth Wilson thought she had been the victim of an accidental shooting. In fact, a post-mortem revealed that she had been stabbed repeatedly.

Publisher's Comments:

About Helen, the tiny, blonde, serious girl whom the narrator meets when they are both looking after children during a summer vacation in Normandy. Her adventures in search of a morally satisfying life lead her into situations that are neither satisfying nor moral, from the mining boom in Central Africa to child abuse scandals of 1980s.

Publisher's Comments:

Half a Life finds the veteran Booker Prize-winning novelist VS Naipaul on familiar territory, blending autobiography and fiction in an exploration of the "half lives" of individuals brought up in the English colonies and educated in the metropolitan centre.
Naipaul's protagonist is Willie Somerset Chandran, named after Somerset Maugham's encounter with Willie's father in the 1930s, whilst travelling "to get material for a novel about spirituality". Willie travels to England for his education, where he becomes "part of the special, passing bohemian-immigrant life of London of the late 1950s". Willie soon realises that his colonial background allows him to write short stories for well-meaning white liberals. Willie soon begins "to understand that he was free to present himself as he wished" and that he could "re-make himself and his past" through his writing. The effect is suffocating rather than liberating, and he marries a vaguely sketched "girl or young woman from an African country" who has read his one published book. Willie begins another "half life" in colonial Mozambique, where he soon tires of the domestic and sexual tedium of plantation life, and flees to Germany, mournfully reflecting that "I have been hiding for too long".

This is classic Naipaul, with its effortless dissection of the damaging personal consequences of post-war decolonisation, but its virtue seems it primary vice, as the novel feels like a conflation of several earlier Naipaul books, including The Mimic Men and the brilliant A Bend in the River. Consequently, some readers may well find that Half a Life reads more like half a novel.

Publisher's Comments:

Lyra and Will find themselves in the final part of the story facing great perils. But there are old friends that come to their aid, not least Iorek Byrnison, the armoured bear, and the scientist, Dr Mary Malone. There are new allies: the Galvespians, hand-high dragonfly riders with poison spurs, and the mulefa, strange wheeled creatures with the power to see Dust. And there are new dangers, including a journey to the worst world of all- a journey that exerts a terrible cost on both children.

Publisher's Comments:

Vishnu, the odd-job man in a Bombay apartment block, lies dying on the staircase landing. In his fevered state, he looks back on his love affair with the seductive Padmini while around him is played out the drama of the apartment block dwellers. Blending Hindu mythology with acutely observed social detail and a dash of Bollywood sparkle, THE DEATH OF VISHNU is a breathtaking debut.

Publisher's Comments:

Father Archangel Gstir, a good-natured Bavarian priest, has been sent to the wilds of Canada to set up a new parish. He recruits Joseph Becker to create a crucifix. Many decades later his granddaughter Klara who has learnt Joseph's skills is called upon to carve a monument to the Canadian dead.

Publisher's Comments:

On the run, in a far-off era of civil strife, Leto gives birth to twins, shelters with wolves, survives in a desert stronghold as the lover of its commander, amongst other adventures. Sweeps from mythological times and the Middle Ages to the treasure hunting of Victorian Europe and then into the present day.

Kenneth Baker (Chair), Philip Hensher, Michele Roberts, Kate Summerscale, and Professor Rory Watson