Man Booker Prize Winners & Finalists (2002)

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Publisher's Comments

The son of a zookeeper, Pi Patel has an encyclopedic knowledge of animal behavior and a fervent love of stories. When Pi is sixteen, his family emigrates from India to North America aboard a Japanese cargo ship, along with their zoo animals bound for new homes.

The ship sinks. Pi finds himself alone in a lifeboat, his only companions a hyena, an orangutan, a wounded zebra, and Richard Parker, a 450-pound Bengal tiger. Soon the tiger has dispatched all but Pi, whose fear, knowledge, and cunning allow him to coexist with Richard Parker for 227 days while lost at sea. When they finally reach the coast of Mexico , Richard Parker flees to the jungle, never to be seen again. The Japanese authorities who interrogate Pi refuse to believe his story and press him to tell them "the truth." After hours of coercion, Pi tells a second story, a story much less fantastical, much more conventional--but is it more true?

Publisher's Comments:

The setting is Bombay , mid-1990s. Nariman Vakeel, suffering from Parkinson's disease, is the elderly patriarch of a small discordant family. In a building called Chateau Felicity, he and his two middle-aged stepchildren—Coomy, bitter and domineering, and her just-younger brother, Jal, mild-mannered and acquiescent—occupy a once-elegant apartment whose ruin is progressing as rapidly as Nariman's disease. Coomy has “rules to govern every aspect of [Nariman's] shrunken life,” but even she cannot keep him from his evening walks. When he stumbles and breaks an ankle (fulfilling one of Coomy's nagging prophecies), she has hardly said “I told you so” before she is plotting to turn his round-the-clock care over to her younger, sweet-tempered half sister. Roxana, her husband, and their two sons live in an already overcrowded apartment, but Coomy knows that Roxana will not refuse her. What Coomy cannot know is that she has set in motion a great unraveling (and an unexpected repair) of the family—and a revelation of its deeply love-torn past.

Family Matters is a story of familial love and obligation, of memory's ability to keep truth alive, and of the danger of memory denied. At once sweeping and intimate, comic and tragic, it is a kaleidoscopic, profoundly affecting saga of home and heart.

Publisher's Comments:

"I'm not interested, the way some people are, in being sad. I've had a look, and there's nothing down that road. Well now! What about the ripping sound behind my eyes, the starchy tearing of fabric, end to end; what about the need I have to curl up my knees when I sleep?"

For all of her life, 44 year old Reta Winters has enjoyed the useful monotony of happiness: a loving family, good friends, growing success as a writer of light 'summertime' fiction. But this placid existence is cracked wide open when her beloved eldest daughter, Norah, drops out to sit on a gritty street corner, silent but for the sign around her neck that reads 'GOODNESS.' Reta's search for what drove her daughter to such a desperate statement turns into an unflinching and surprisingly funny meditation on where we find meaning and hope.

Warmth, passion and wisdom come together in Shields' remarkably supple prose. Unless, a harrowing but ultimately consoling story of one family's anguish and healing, proves her mastery of extraordinary fictions about ordinary life.

Publisher's Comments

The stunning new novel from highly acclaimed author William Trevor is a brilliant, subtle, and moving story of love, guilt, and forgiveness. The Gault family leads a life of privilege in early 1920s Ireland , but the threat of violence leads the parents of nine-year-old Lucy to decide to leave for England , her mother's home. Lucy cannot bear the thought of leaving Lahardane, their country house with its beautiful land and nearby beach, and a dog she has befriended. On the day before they are to leave, Lucy runs away, hoping to convince her parents to stay. Instead, she sets off a series of tragic misunderstandings that affect all of Lahardane's inhabitants for the rest of their lives.

Publisher's Comments:

From the author of the New York Times Notable Book Tipping the Velvet and the award-winning Affinity : a spellbinding, twisting tale of a great swindle, of fortunes and hearts won and lost, set in Victorian London among a family of thieves.

Sue Trinder is an orphan, left as an infant in the care of Mrs. Sucksby, a "baby farmer," who raised her with unusual tenderness, as if Sue were her own. Mrs. Sucksby's household, with its fussy babies calmed with doses of gin, also hosts a transient family of petty thieves — fingersmiths — for whom this house in the heart of a mean London slum is home.

One day, the most beloved thief of all arrives — Gentleman, a somewhat elegant con man, who carries with him an enticing proposition for Sue: If she wins a position as the maid to Maud Lilly, a naïve gentlewoman, and aids Gentleman in her seduction, then they will all share in Maud's vast inheritance. Once the inheritance is secured, Maud will be left to live out her days in a mental hospital. With dreams of paying back the kindness of her adopted family, Sue agrees to the plan. Once in, however, Sue begins to pity her helpless mark and care for Maud Lilly in unexpected ways....But no one and nothing is as it seems in this Dickensian novel of thrills and surprises.

Publisher's Comments:

Luther Fox, a loner, haunted by his past, makes his living as an illegal fisherman -- a shamateur. Before everyone in his family was killed in a freak rollover, he grew melons and played guitar in the family band. Robbed of all that, he has turned his back on music. There's too much emotion in it, too much memory and pain.

One morning Fox is observed poaching by Georgie Jutland. Chance, or a kind of willed recklessness, has brought Georgie into the life and home of Jim Buckridge, the most prosperous fisherman in the area and a man who loathes poachers, Fox above all. But she's never fully settled into Jim's grand house on the water or into the inbred community with its history of violent secrets. After Georgie encounters Fox, her tentative hold on conventional life is severed. Neither of them would call it love, but they can't stay away from each other.

Set in the dramatic landscape of Western Australia, Dirt Music is a love story about people stifled by grief and regret; a novel about the odds of breaking with the past and about the lure of music. Dirt music, Fox tells Georgie, is "anything you can play on a verandah or porch, without electricity." Even in the wild, Luther cannot escape it. There is, he discovers, no silence in nature.

Ambitious, perfectly calibrated, Dirt Music resonates with suspense and supercharged emotion -- and it confirms Tim Winton's status as the preeminent Australian novelist of his generation.

Publisher's Comments:

Dr Simmonds is infatuated with an unhappily married patient, Yvonne. When she presents him with a novel about a certain Dr Glas, Simmonds immediately recognizes his own affinity with the fictional doctor. The trouble is that Dr Glas deliberately murders the husband of the one he loved.

Publisher's Comments:

Axel Vander, celebrated academic and man of culture, is spending his twilight years on the west coast of America. For decades he has lived with the knowledge of a tragedy of which he was both perpetrator and victim. Now, out of the blue, a letter arrives hinting at the secrets he has been hiding for fifty years. To find out just how much the writer knows about his past Vander arranges to meet her in Turin. But he is thrown into emotional turmoil by this encounter with Cass Cleave, a deeply troubled young woman desperate to discover a reason to continue living; and the meeting of the two leads inexorably towards disaster. Written in Banville's faultless, almost painfully beautiful prose, Shroud is a novel which is not afraid to ask deep questions, nor to answer them emphatically. It is a richly rewarding work from one of the most accomplished novelists of his generation.

Publisher's Comments:

A brilliantly original and laceratingly funny novel about ordinary people thrown from the course of their lives by extraordinary events. Isla at forty-nine is reveling in second chances. Her first marriage ended horrifically, but her career thrives. Her two grown children are still reverberating from the shock of their father's actions, but she has hopes for their recovery. And she has found in Lyle, her second husband, a man she both loves and trusts. Roddy is seventeen, restless and anxious to escape the confines of his small town. He and his best friend, dreaming of glittering, more glamorous city vistas, devise a plan that will deliver them there, and into the lives they have imagined. But in the moment of an ill-timed encounter, everything changes for both Isla and Roddy, and in the wake of that moment, each must reconstruct their lives on new and unexpected foundations. Critical Injuries is a stunning achievement, a novel of catastrophe, of hope and forgiveness, and of tenuous flashes of grace. "Critical Injuries, Joan Barfoot's eighth novel, is a finely crafted fiction, perfectly paced to entice the reader...The subtle narrative follows first Isla, then Roddy, back and forth, in a simple dance that gently guides the reader through tough emotional terrain. ..A remarkable achievement."

Publisher's Comments:

Logan Gonzago Mountstuart, writer, was born in 1906, and died of a heart attack on October 5, 1991, aged 85. Any Human Heart is his disjointed autobiography, a massive tome chronicling "my personal rollercoaster"--or rather, "not so much a rollercoaster", but a yo-yo, "a jerking spinning toy in the hands of a maladroit child". From his early childhood in Montevideo, son of an English corned beef executive and his Uraguayan secretary, through his years at a Norfolk public school and Oxford, Mountstuart traces his haphazard development as a writer. Early and easy success is succeeded by a long half-century of mediocrity, disappointments and setbacks, both personal and professional, leading him to multiple failed marriages, internment, alcoholism and abject poverty.

Mountstuart's sorry tale is also the story of a British way of life in inexorable decline, as his journey takes in the Bloomsbury set, the General Strike, the Spanish Civil War, 1930s Americans in Paris, wartime espionage, New York avant garde art, even the Baader-Meinhof gang--all with a stellar supporting cast. The most sustained and best moment comes mid-book, as Mountstuart gets caught up in one of Britain's murkier wartime secrets, in the company of the here truly despicable Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Elsewhere author William Boyd occasionally misplaces his tongue too obviously in his cheek--the Wall Street Crash is trailed with truly crashing inelegance--but overall Any Human Heart is a witty, inventive and ultimately moving novel. Boyd succeeds in conjuring not only a compelling 20th century but also, in the hapless Logan Mountstuart, an anti-hero who achieves something approaching passive greatness.

Publisher's Comments:

Herz wondered if the people he passed on the street ruminated on lost causes, as he did. Try as he might to divert himself, he could never escape the suspicion that he should be elsewhere.' Herz is seventy-three and facing the difficult question: what is he going to do with the rest of his life? How is it all going to end? He could propose marriage to an old friend he hasn't seen for thirty years; he could travel, he could make a trip to Paris to see a favourite painting; he could sell his flat, move, start afresh. He must do something with the time left but what?

Publisher's Comments:

A powerful, atmospheric novel set in 1946 at the Wash on the Fenland coast, from the author of "The Book of the Heathen" and "The Glassmaker". He captures the sense of portent and uncertainty shared by a community in the aftermath of conflict - in which peacetime is hardly any different to wartime.

Publisher's Comments:

In the quiet cul-de-sac where Keith and Stephen live there is very little evidence of the Second World War. But the two friends suspect that the inhabitants of the Close are not what they seem. As Keith authoritatively informs the trusting Stephen, the whole district is riddled with secret passages and underground laboratories. Then one day Keith announces an even more disconcerting discovery: the Germans have infiltrated his own family, and the children find themselves engulfed in mysteries far deeper and more painful than they had bargained for.

Publisher's Comments:

Alix, arrogant, middle-aged and angry comes home to the derelict port of Liverpool as her mother lies dying. Irritably resigned to living alone for the rest of her life she suddenly finds herself erotically attracted to a stranger. Joseph is an American architect who has come to the city to build a hotel. Refusing to accept that his wife has left him or the trauma of a war he once fought in, the question is whether these survivors of the battles of the Seventies are meant for each other or not. And what happened to a factory in Dresden which long ago made the perfect face cream ...'Perhaps her most accessible novel to date . Grant's prose is blunt, honest, yet often beautiful and bitingly funny. Equally comfortable discussing concepts of justice and grooming routinme, the voices Grant creates are striking and authentic. Her characters are irascible, witty, fierce, and full of the contradictions and blind spots that make them wholly human.

Publisher's Comments:

The breakthrough novel from Britain's most brilliant young critic: 'Prepare to be dazzled...The Mulberry Empire is executed with flair, confidence and great energy -- a really terrific read and one hell of an achievement.' Victoria Glendinning, Daily Telegraph 'We are in the 1830s and the Great Game, the elegant but deadly dance between Great Britain and Russia for power and influence in Asia, is under way. Alexander Burnes, a bright young thing with a taste for adventure, flies the flag for London, having bidden a sad farewell to his love, Bella Garraway. From St Petersburg comes the equally enigmatic Vitkevich. Both men are wooing the Amir Dost Mohammed, emperor of the Afghans, on their countries' behalf...The cast of characters is extensive, the grandiloquence of empire wonderfully evoked; The Mulberry Empire will be read with pleasure for years to come.' Justin Marozzi, Spectator

Publisher's Comments:

Marvin Kreitman, the luggage baron of South London, lives for sex. Or at least he lives for women. At present, he loves four women - his mother, his wife Hazel, and his two daughters - and is in love with five more. Charlie Merriweather, on the other hand, nice Charlie, loves just the one woman, also called Charlie, the wife with whom he has been writing children's books and having nice sex for twenty years. Once a week, the two friends meet for a Chinese lunch, contriving never quite to have the conversation they would like to have - about fidelity and womanising, and which makes happier. Until today. It is Charlie who takes the dangerous step of asking for a piece of Marvin's disordered life, but what follows embroils them all, the wives no less that the husbands. And none of them will ever be the same again.

Publisher's Comments:

On a street in a town in the North of England, ordinary people are going through the motions of their everyday existence - street cricket, barbecues, painting windows...A young man is in love with a neighbour who does not even know his name. An old couple make their way up to the nearby bus stop. But then a terrible event shatters the quiet of the early summer evening. That this remarkable and horrific event is only poignant to those who saw it, not even meriting a mention on the local news, means that those who witness it will be altered for ever.

Publisher's Comments:

It is 1981 and the "Royal Broodmare", as Henry Wotton calls her, is about to be married. Wotton, a homosexual, and his friend Baz have found a remarkable young man Dorian Gray, the epitome of male beauty. Sixteen years later, how does Dorian remain so youthful?

Publisher's Comments:

In her second novel, The Autograph Man, Zadie Smith has set herself the unenviable task of following up a certain segment of recent literary history. Her first novel, the bestselling, award-laden and much-hyped White Teeth wore its ambitions lightly: an exuberant comic foray into the lives of three disparate families living in suburban north London, it dealt simultaneously--and deftly--with wider multicultural and political motifs.
The Autograph Man has a similar ebullience and an equally dazzling panoply of characters. Its hero Alex Li-Tandem is "one of this generation who watch themselves", a Chinese-Jewish north Londoner who is first introduced as a child accompanying his father to a wrestling match between those two larger-than-life scions of 1970s Saturday afternoon television--Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks. When Alex's father dies in the pandemonium surrounding the pursuit of Big Daddy's autograph, the twin themes of the novel are launched--one is the bereaved Alex's search for a replacement to fill the gulf, the other his obsession with tracking down, buying and selling autographs. Alex seeks one autograph in particular and seemingly in vain--that of Kitty Alexander, a fading film star. The route he follows in his search has much to say about the nature of celebrity and the privacy of souls, of fantasy and reality--all narrated in Smith's breathless prose.

The Autograph Man plays on many strands and clever observations--in particular Jewishness, goyishness and Zen Buddhism. Smith is a superbly assured writer whose images stick in the mind; for example, Alex's girlfriend Esther has "hair plaited like a puzzle". The dialogue is vivid and there is much humour but at times the convoluted plot threatens to spill over into anarchy and the humour can be self-conscious. Though this does not diminish the entertainment value of The Autograph Man, it does--frustratingly--make it appear insincere.

Publisher's Comments

To the Last City is set deep in the Peruvian Andes, where five ill-prepared travellers - men and women with different values, temperaments and motives - find themselves trekking through one of the most exacting and beautiful regions on earth. It is a journey which may temper or destroy them. They confront not only their relationships with one another, but also the enigmas of the country's past, the dangers of its present, and the limitations of their own minds and bodies. The 'lost city' of their destination is Vilcabamba, last refuge of the Inca against the Spaniards, subsumed by jungle for four hundred years. In this brilliant exploration of the psychological challenges of travelling, set within the exotic jungle of South America, Colin Thubron for the first time joins his highly acclaimed talents as a travel writer with his gifts as a novelist.

Lisa Jardine (Chair), David Baddiel, Russell Celyn Jones, Salley Vickers, and Erica Wagner