Man Booker Prize Winners & Finalists (2003)

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Publisher's Comments:

After an arranged marriage to Chanu, a man twenty years older, Nazneen is taken to London, leaving her home and heart in the Bangladeshi village where she was born. Her new world is full of mysteries. How can she cross the road without being hit by a car (an operation akin to dodging raindrops in the monsoon)? What is the secret of her bullying neighbor Mrs. Islam? What is a Hell's Angel? And how must she comfort the nave and disillusioned Chanu?

As a good Muslim girl, Nazneen struggles to not question why things happen. She submits, as she must, to Fate and devotes herself to her husband and daughters. Yet to her amazement, she begins an affair with a handsome young radical, and her erotic awakening throws her old certainties into chaos.

Monica Ali's splendid novel is about journeys both external and internal, where the marvellous and the terrifying spiral together.

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Publisher's Comments:

A stunning and provocative new novel by the internationally celebrated author of The Blind Assassin, winner of the Booker Prize.

Margaret Atwood's new novel is so utterly compelling, so prescient, so relevant, so terrifyingly-all-too-likely-to-be-true, that readers may find their view of the world forever changed after reading it.

This is Margaret Atwood at the absolute peak of her powers. For readers of Oryx and Crake, nothing will ever look the same again.

The narrator of Atwood's riveting novel calls himself Snowman. When the story opens, he is sleeping in a tree, wearing an old bedsheet, mourning the loss of his beloved Oryx and his best friend Crake, and slowly starving to death. He searches for supplies in a wasteland where insects proliferate and pigoons and wolvogs ravage the pleeblands, where ordinary people once lived, and the Compounds that sheltered the extraordinary. As he tries to piece together what has taken place, the narrative shifts to decades earlier. How did everything fall apart so quickly? Why is he left with nothing but his haunting memories? Alone except for the green-eyed Children of Crake, who think of him as a kind of monster, he explores the answers to these questions in the double journey he takes - into his own past, and back to Crake's high-tech bubble-dome, where the Paradice Project unfolded and the world came to grief.

With breathtaking command of her shocking material, and with her customary sharp wit and dark humour, Atwood projects us into an outlandish yet wholly believable realm populated by characters who will continue to inhabit our dreams long after the last chapter. This is Margaret Atwood at the absolute peak of her powers.

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Publisher's Comments:

A taut, intense tale of the dashed hopes of the post-apartheid era and the small betrayals that doom a friendship, "The Good Doctor is an extraordinary parable of the corruption of the flesh and spirit. It assures Damon Galgut's place as a major international talent. When Laurence Waters arrives at his new post at a deserted rural hospital, staff physician Frank Eloff is instantly suspicious. Laurence is everything Frank is not--young, optimistic, and full of big ideas. The whole town is beset with new arrivals and the return of old faces. Frank reestablishes a liaison with a woman, one which will have unexpected consequences. A self-made dictator from apartheid days is rumored to be active in cross-border smuggling and a group of soldiers has moved in to track him, led by a man from Frank's own dark past. Laurence sees only possibilities--but in a world where the past is demanding restitution from the present, his ill-starred idealism cannot last.

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Publisher's Comments:

A lonely schoolteacher reveals more than she intends when she records the story of her best friend's affair with a pupil in this sly, insightful novel Schoolteacher Barbara Covett has led a solitary existence; aside from her cat, Portia, she has few friends and no intimates. When Sheba Hart joins St. George's as the new art teacher, Barbara senses the possibility of a new friendship. It begins with lunches and continues with regular invitations to meals with Sheba's seemingly close-knit family. But as Barbara and Sheba's relationship develops, another does as well: Sheba has begun a passionate affair with an underage male student. When it comes to light and Sheba falls prey to the inevitable media circus, Barbara decides to write an account in her freind's defense--an account that reveals not only Sheba's secrets but her own. "What Was She Thinking? is a story of repression and passion, envy and complacence, friendship and loneliness. A complex psychological portrait framed as a wicked satire, it is by turns funny, poignant, and sinister. With it, Zoe Heller surpasses the promise of her critically acclaimed first novel, Everything You Know.

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Publisher's Comments:

Booker finalist Astonishing Splashes of Colour takes its title from J. M. Barrie's description of Peter Pan's Neverland. It follows the life of Kitty, a woman who, in a sense, has never grown up. She lives an improvised life reviewing children's books, visiting her husband who lives in the apartment next door, and fostering a growing obsession to replace her lost child.

Kitty's strong, appealing personality drives this novel, as she relates her story in a jumbled state of consciousness. Her moods swing dramatically from high to low and are illuminated by an unusual ability to interpret people and emotions through colour. Kitty struggles to uncover the secrets of her childhood from her father and brothers, but their revelations threaten to overwhelm her tenuous hold on reality, leaving the reader feeling both sympathetic and horrified with her impetuous journey into madness. Skillful, unsentimental, fresh, and original, this is a sparkling debut by a writer of exceptional talent.

Publisher's Comments:

When 'dream husband' Xan Meo is vengefully assaulted in the garden of a London pub, he suffers head-injury, and personality-change. Like a spiritual convert, the familial paragon becomes an anti-husband, an anti-father. He submits to an alien moral system - one among many to be found in these pages. We are introduced to the inverted worlds of the 'yellow' journalist, Clint Smoker; the high priest of hardmen, Joseph Andrews; the porno tycoon, Cora Susan; and Kent Price, the corpse in the hold of the stricken airliner, apparently determined, even in death, to bring down the plane that carries his spouse. Meanwhile, we explore the entanglements of Henry England: his incapacitated wife, Pamela; his Chinese mistress, He Zhezun; his fifteen-year-old daughter, Victoria, the victim of a filmed 'intrusion' which rivets the world - because she is the future Queen of England, and her father, Henry IX, is its King. The connections between these characters provide the pattern and drive of "Yellow Dog". Novelists have noticed that contemporary reality keeps outdoing their imaginations. Yet there is still the obligation to attempt a reading of the present and the very near future. If, in the twenty-first century, the moral reality is changing, then the novel is changing too, whether it likes it or not. "Yellow Dog" is an early example of how the novel, or more particularly the comic novel, can respond to this transformation. But Martin Amis is also concerned here with what is changeless and perhaps unchangeable - patriarchy, and the entire edifice of masculinity; the enormous category-error of violence, arising between man and man; the tortuous alliances between men and women; and the vanished dream (probably always an illusion, but now a clear delusion) that we can protect our future and our progeny.

Publisher's Comments:

Gorton, Manchester. 1930. Greyhound racing at Belle Vue, the buses going up and down Hyde Road, the siren of Peacock's foundry going off every night at six. This is Bessie and Sam Holloway's place, home for Nell and little brother Bobby and older step-child Violet. Precious visits from Dad's sister Benny, a Queen of the music hall trailing clouds of glory and whisky, provide infrequent brushes with glamour. 'Alright for some,' grunts Bessie. Nell grows up to work in a factory and there, from the tailgate of a truck in the yard, she first hears fellow factory worker Harry Caplin play trombone break on the old jazz classic, Clarinet Marmalade. Harry's talent will take him far and introduce him to such jazz legends as Louis Armstrong and Jack Teagarden; but not as far as poor feckless Bobby, who finds himself fighting in the jungles of Malaya. Spanning the twentieth century, this is story of three generations of a Manchester family.

Publisher's Comments:

Set in Britain during the 1950s, this moving and evocative novel follows the intertwined fates of people crossing boundaries in their lives. As a teenager in the small northern town of Wigton, Joe Richardson falls in love with Rachel, just when her life is about to be uprooted. While his parents, Sam and Ellen, face the frontiers of middle age, Joe finds himself drawn by the intoxicating world outside home, and swept into situations that seem beyond his control. Vividly conveying the spirit of the mid-century and the profound social changes taking place at the time, this is a masterly successor to the award-winning The Soldier's Return and A Son Of War.

Publisher's Comments:

Elizabeth Costello is an Australian writer of international renown. Famous principally for an early novel that established her reputation, she has reached the stage where her remaining function is to be venerated and applauded. Her life has become a series of engagements in sterile conference rooms throughout the world - a private consciousness obliged to reveal itself to a curious public: the presentation of a major award at an American college where she is required to deliver a lecture; a sojourn as the writer in residence on a cruise liner; a visit to her sister, a missionary in Africa, who is receiving an honorary degree, an occasion which both recognise as the final opportunity for effecting some form of reconciliation; and a disquieting appearance at a writers' conference in Amsterdam where she finds the subject of her talk unexpectedly amongst the audience. She has made her life's work the study of other people yet now it is she who is the object of scrutiny. But, for her, what matters is the continuing search for a means of articulating her vision and the verdict of future generations.

Publisher's Comments:

The touching and wonderfully engaging second novel from the author of CROCODILE SOUP. It is late December and fifteen year old Caris is trying to hang an angel on a Christmas tree in a terraced street in Newcastle upon Tyne. She is interrupted by the arrival of the police who have come to the house to announce that her mother, Louise, has been caught stealing shoes in a department store in town. Caris's father Mac, a taxi driver, struggles to keep the family together as Christmas looks set for disaster, especially when Louise's drunken, dishevelled mother moves in.

Publisher's Comments:

In an unnamed European village, in the middle of a civil war, one man digs while another watches over him. Gradually, they begin to talk. Over the course of the afternoon, as the snow falls and truck-loads of villagers are corralled in the next field, we discover why they are there - not just who they are and how specific, sinister events in their country have led them to be separated by a deepening grave, but why the history of civilization is inseparable from the history of mass violence. Beautifully written, with a poet's eye for detail coupled with a chilling narrative drive, Gerard Donovan's first novel has been compared with Franz Kafka and Bernhard Schlink. SCHOPENHAUER'S TELESCOPE is current in the best sense - not merely about Bosnia or Kosovo, but in attempting to make art out of brutal life.

Publisher's Comments:

‘The Romantic [is] Barbara Gowdy’s very tender portrait of the relationship between Abel and Louise, doomed by Abel’s ongoing affair with alcohol… Gowdy has always been an expert at getting inside the heads of people who don’t quite fit in. Here, the misfit is Louise, who has that exhilarating feeling of being rescued when she finds her soulmate, Abel. As children, they play in their ravine hideout in a loving exercise in creativity. But as teenagers, drugs and booze take over, and Louise unravels when she can’t break the pattern: he loves her, he loves to drink more, and when he drinks he fucks around. And she still loves him. Gowdy’s gift is in making us understand how this kind of thing can happen, how somebody can sustain a commitment to a person so obviously going into the crapper. We know Abel’s going to die. The question is, will Louise’s self-worth and whatever life ambitions she has left die with him?… As always, the detail is precise, the observations canny. I do miss the crazy humour of Gowdy’s earlier books. But there’s something else going on here – a gorgeously painful and wholly grown-up sense of longing. That’s just as important.’

Publisher's Comments:

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a murder mystery novel like no other. The detective, and narrator, is Christopher Boone. Christopher is fifteen and has Asperger's, a form of autism. He knows a very great deal about maths and very little about human beings. He loves lists, patterns and the truth. He hates the colours yellow and brown and being touched. He has never gone further than the end of the road on his own, but when he finds a neighbour's dog murdered he sets out on a terrifying journey which will turn his whole world upside down.

Publisher's Comments:

'It was though God had sent it to me,' Meg said to her sister Sylvia, about her first encounter with Ahmad. 'More like the devil,' Sylvia had thought but not said. Francis King's entertaining new novel looks at the havoc wrought when a young Egyptian - an illegal immigrant - finds himself in London. Ahmad leads a double life, befriending and lodging with an elderly woman who suffers from MS; while at the same time throwing himself onto the London gay scene. Jealousy looms when he begins a relationship with a gay protector - and is arrested because of his illegal status.

Publisher's Comments:

The Nautilus, a strange building shaped like the chambered shell of the same name, was built in South London in the early 1930's. Designed on Modernist and Utopian principles, it was a haven for a floating community of cosmpolitan refugees, intellectuals and artists. Now, at the end of the century, only two of the original inhabitants still occupy their chambers - Celeste Zylberstein, joint architect, with her late husband, of the Nautilus, and Francis Campion, an elderly poet. Gus Crabb, a dealer in bric-a-brac, is the only other resident until, to the Nautilus, like a hermit crab seeking a home, comes Rowena Snow. Of Indian/Scottish parentage, orphaned without family or friends, Rowena is in search of her own Utopia - or the Heligoland of her childhood imagination.

Publisher's Comments:

Meet Vince Mori, an Italian Cumbrian, and a very passionate man.  Vince is obsessed with women, the clarinet, and his trad jazz band, The Chompin Stompers.  His romantic son Enzo is obsessed with only one woman, his brilliant Oxford contemporary, the world-famous jazz guitarist, Fanny Golightly.  Unfortunately, single-minded Fanny only has eyes for a Portuguese musical legend called Toto Cebola.  John Murray's revolutionary new novel is the ideal read for all those interested in the cosmopolitan music scene and the Eternal Triangle.

Publisher's Comments:

On a Monday night in October in a small seaside town in Suffolk, a woman is brutally murdered. There are no obvious suspects, she was not an obvious victim. She just wasn't, thinks her grieving, bewildered friend Tess, the type to have something happen to her. "Something Might Happen" is not a murder mystery. There are clues, false trails, detectives, all the paraphernalia of the whodunnit, but Myerson's concern is with the effect of the murder on an ordinary community and specifically Tess herself, her husband Mick and her three children. As the police go about their routine investigation, Tess' world of nappies, school runs and baked beans begin to unravel. Suddenly nothing is certain, the mundane becomes charged with significance, established relationships begin to crumble and places that once were safe are safe no longer...

Publisher's Comments:

Promoted young to the position of Crown Court Judge - because of his ability, because of the political convenience of promoting a man with coloured skin - it's time for Daniel Savage to settle down. Perhaps his marriage is happy enough after all. Teenage children require a father's attention. His career demands the most responsible behaviour. Day by day Judge Savage presides over those whose double lives have been exposed. He must be above suspicion. But the passage from complexity to simplicity eludes him. Why does his daughter refuse to move to the spacious new house he and his wife have bought? Why does a young Korean woman keep phoning him to beg for help? As the most tangled lives are ironed out in court, Daniel Savage's own existence descends into a mess of violence and confusion. The solid English society, of which his public school background ironically makes him the representative, has fragmented into an incomprehensible public gallery where every face conceals a different culture. And those most with whom we have the greatest intimacy are suddenly the most frighteningly mysterious. A hero by chance only to be overwhelmed with disgrace, Daniel Savage's attempt to keep some kind of grip on the world will keep the reader in a torment of tension to the last page, and leave him seriously disoriented for some time afterwards. At the same time the sense of recognition is overwhelming. This is the feverish disorientation of the modern city street.

Publisher's Comments:

Dorothy and Solomon live in a new housing estate on the outskirts of an English village. She's recently bought her bungalow; he's recently become the night watchman. He is black, an immigrant. She is white, a recently retired music teacher. They are both solitary, reticent outsiders. When they move tenuously toward each other and their paths briefly cross, neither of them can know that it will be the last true human contact either will have.

Publisher's Comments:

Jonathan Raban’s powerful novel is set in Seattle in 1999, at the height of its infatuation with the virtual. It’s a place that attracts immigrants. One of these is Tom Janeway, a bookish Hungarian-born Englishman who makes his living commenting on American mores on NPR. Another, who calls himself Chick, is a frenetically industrious illegal alien from China who makes his living any way he can.

Through a series of extraordinary but chillingly plausible events, the paths of these newcomers converge. Tom is uprooted from his marriage and must learn to father his endearing eight-year old son part-time. Chick claws his way up from exploited to exploiter. Meanwhile Seattle is troubled by rioting anarchists, vanishing children, and the discovery of an al-Qaeda operative; it is a city on the brink. Savage and tender, visionary and addictively entertaining, Waxwings is a major achievement.

Publisher's Comments:

Sarah is in prison. Every fortnight she is visited by George, the private eye she employed to observe the final stage of her husband's affair. The visits - and the days between - lead George back into Sarah's past and into events he can picture only too well, while bringing him ever closer to a time he can't quite imagine - when she will once again step out into the clear light of day...

Publisher's Comments:

Dinah and Lisa are growing up in 1950's South Africa, where racial laws are tightening. They are two little girls from a liberal family – big sister Lisa is strong and sensible, while Dinah is weedy and arty. At school, the sadistic Mrs Vaughan-Jones provides instruction in mental arithmetic and racial prejudice. And then there's the puzzle of lunch break. 'Would you rather have a native girl or a koelie to make your sandwiches?’ a classmate asks. But Dinah doesn’t know, because it's her dad who makes them. As the repressive shadow of apartheid closes in, Dinah journeys through childhood and adolescence and the minefields of boys and university in this vibrant and irresistible novel.

Professor John Carey (Chair), A.C. Grayling, Francine Stock, Rebecca Stephens, and D.J. Taylor