Man Booker Prize Winners & Finalists (2004)

Planning to read all of the Booker books?  Download the TurboBookSnob's Tracking Sheet - it contains a complete list of all of the nominated books, with space to track your progress and comments.

   Tracking Sheet

Publisher's Comments:

It is the summer of 1983, and young Nick Guest has moved into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: Gerald, an ambitious new Tory MP, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their children Toby and Catherine. As the boom-years of the mid-80s unfold, Nick, an innocent in matters of politics and money, becomes caught up in the Feddens' world, with its grand parties, its holidays in the Dordogne, its parade of monsters both comic and threatening. In an era of endless possibility, Nick finds himself able to pursue his own private obsession, with beauty - a prize as compelling to him as power and riches are to his friends. An affair with a young black clerk gives him his first experience of romance; but it is a later affair, with a beautiful millionaire, that will change his life more drastically and bring into question the larger fantasies of a ruthless
decade.

Publisher's Comments:

The last time Silas Ali encountered Lieutenant Du Boise, Silas was locked in the back of a police van and the Lieutenant was conducting a vicious assault on his wife Lydia, in revenge for her husband's ANC activities. When Silas sees him again, by chance, twenty years later, as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is due to deliver its report, crimes from the past erupt into the present, splintering the Ali's fragile family life.

Bitter Fruit is the story of Silas, Mikey and Lydia, a brittle family in a dysfunctional society. By turns harrowing, erotic and fearlessly satirical, it is a portrait of modern South Africa that also addresses questions of universal significance.

Publisher's Comments:

Opening in the seaside resort of Morecambe Bay during its early 1900s heyday, The Electric Michelangelo chronicles the remarkable life of Cy Parks. Spending his childhood helping his eccentric mother Reeda run her macabre guest house, he is then apprenticed to Eliot Riley, the greatesttattoo artist in the northern counties, from whom he learns his strange folk craft.

After a decade of abuse and in the wake of Riley's violent death, Cy flees to America, where he sets up his own business on the infamous Coney Island boardwalk. In this riotous carnival environment of roller-coasters and freak shows, while the crest of the amusement industry wave is breaking, Cy becomes enamoured with Grace, a mysterious European immigrant and circus performer, who commissions him to cover her body entirely with tattooed eyes. Hugely atmospheric, anecdotal and historical, Sarah Hall's second novel casts an imaginative spell of local colour and lyrical prose.

Publisher's Comments:

In a bold and unconventionally structured work, David Mitchell combines the stories of six individuals to create a masterful whole, which is both thought provoking and incredibly exhilarating.

The morality and ambitions of a reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan's California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; a genetically modified ‘dinery server' on death-row; and Zachry, a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisation echo and impact on each others stories and point to a terrifying vision of the world's future and challenges our ability to shape not only our destiny but those that will come after us.

Publisher's Comments:

In The Master, Colm Tóibín tells the story of Henry James, an American-born genius of the modern novel who became a connoisseur of exile, living among artists and aristocrats in Paris, Rome, Venice and London.

In January 1895 James anticipates the opening of his first play in London. He has never been so vulnerable, nor felt so deeply unsuited to the public gaze. When the production fails, he returns, chastened, to his writing desk. The result is a string of masterpieces, but they are produced at a high personal cost.

Colm Tóibín captures the exquisite anguish of a man whose artistic gifts made his career a triumph but whose private life was haunted by loneliness and longing, and whose sexual identity remained unresolved. Henry James circulated in the grand parlours and palazzos of Europe, he was lauded and admired, yet his attempts at intimacy inevitably failed him and those he tried to love.

Publisher's Comments:

Colette Jones has had drink problems in the past, but now it seems as though her whole family is in danger of turning to alcohol. Her oldest son has thrown away a promising musical career for a job behind the counter in builders' merchants, and his drinking sprees with his brother-in-law Bill, a pseudo-Marxist supermarket butcher who seems to see alcohol as central to the proletarian revolution, have started to land him in trouble with the police.

Meanwhile Colette's recently widowered older brother is following an equally self-destructive path, having knocked back an entire cellar of homemade wine, he's now on the gin, a bottle a day and counting. Who will be next? Her youngest son had decided to run away to sea, but when her own husband hits the bottle Colette realises she has to act.

As the pressure builds on Colette to cope with these damaged people, her own weaknesses begin to emerge, and become crucial to the outcome of all their lives.

Publisher's Comments:

From the outside, fifteen-year-old Kambili has the perfect life. She lives in a beautiful house, has a caring family, and attends an exclusive missionary school. She's completely shielded from the troubles of the world. Yet, as Kambili reveals in her tender-voiced account, things are less than perfect in her wealthy Nigerian home. Although her papa is generous and well respected, he is fanatically religious and tyrannical at home. He looms over his family's every move, severely punishes Kambili and her older brother, Jaja, if they're not the best in their classes, and hits their mama if she disagrees with him. Home is silent and suffocating.

But everything changes once Kambili and Jaja visit Aunty Ifeoma outside the city. For the first time they experience freedom from their papa. Jaja learns to garden and work with his hands, and Kambili secretly falls in love with a young, charismatic priest.

As the country begins to fall apart under a military coup, tension within the family escalates. And shy Kambili must find the strength to keep her family together after her mother commits a desperate act.

Purple Hibiscus is a stunning debut that captures the fragile beauty of a young woman's awakening at a time when both country and family are on the cusp of change.

Publisher's Comments:

In an unnamed town in England, Jugnu and Chanda have disappeared - and Chanda's brothers have been arrested for their murder. What follows is an unravelling of all that is sacred to the family, as the pious Kaukab tries desperately to square the traditional justice of her culture with the more personal consequences of their murder. 'Maps for Lost Lovers' opens the heart of a family at the crossroads of culture, community, nationality and religion and expresses their pain and desire in a language that is arrestingly poetic.

Publisher's Comments:

A Granta Best of British Novelist 2003 Winner of the IMPAC PRIZE for her novel Wide Open. On 5th September 2003, New York Illusionist David Blaine entered a small perspex box adjacent to the River Thames and commenced starving himself. 44 days later -- on 19th October -- he left the box, four stone lighter. That much, at least, is clear.And the rest? The crowds? The chaos? The hype? The rage? The rows? The lust? The filth? The bullshit? The hypocrisy? Nicola Barker fearlessly crams all that and more into this ribald and outrageous peep show of a novel, her most irreverent, caustic, up-to-the-minute work yet, laying bare the heart of our contemporary world, a world of illusion, delusion, celebrity and hunger.

Publisher's Comments:

For generations, the Walkers have lived in the Island, a small, working class mill-town beside Ontario's Attawan River. But in the summer of 1965 their peace is shattered. When a union organiser comes to town, Alf Walker is forced to choose between loyalty to his friends and advancement up the company ranks. His decision threatens to overwhelm not only his own life, but also his family.

Through the course of the book, we come to know the Walkers intimately - Alf, as he attempts to keep ahead of these turbulent events; his son Joe, whose world is overturned by the passion and uncertainty of young love; and his wife Margaret, who must reconcile her English upbringing with the world in which she finds herself.

The Island Walkers is a deeply moving novel of a family struggling to make its way through a changing world. Written with remarkable understanding and perception, it reveals a writer of rare vision and accomplishment.

Publisher's Comments:

England in the 1630's: a difficult country in turbulent times. John Brigge is a governor a man who has kept away from intrigues to work on his farm and be with his wife, now expecting their first child. He is also - secretly - a Catholic. When he is called to settle the murder of a new-born child, Brigge finds himself drawn into matters he wants to avoid. Katherine Shay, an Irishwoman is accused of killing her baby. Brigge wants to wait for more evidence. The ascendant puritan faction, however, demand her immediate hanging. Brigge suspects their haste has little to do with their talk of justice. What are they hiding? And does he really want to know? In the background, a rebellion is brewing. Only Brigge - and his investigation - can change the tide. Torn between home and the world, haunted by the mystery of Katharine Shay he must finally make a stand.

Publisher's Comments:

English magicians were once the wonder of the known world, with fairy servants at their beck and call; they could command winds, mountains, and woods. But by the early 1800s they have long since lost the ability to perform magic. They can only write long, dull papers about it, while fairy servants are nothing but a fading memory.

But at Hurtfew Abbey in Yorkshire, the rich, reclusive Mr Norrell has assembled a wonderful library of lost and forgotten books from England's magical past and regained some of the powers of England's magicians. He goes to London and raises a beautiful young woman from the dead. Soon he is lending his help to the government in the war against Napoleon Bonaparte, creating ghostly fleets of rain-ships to confuse and alarm the French.

All goes well until a rival magician appears. Jonathan Strange is handsome, charming, and talkative — the very opposite of Mr Norrell. Strange thinks nothing of enduring the rigors of campaigning with Wellington's army and doing magic on battlefields. Astonished to find another practicing magician, Mr Norrell accepts Strange as a pupil. But it soon becomes clear that their ideas of what English magic ought to be are very different. For Mr Norrell, their power is something to be cautiously controlled, while Jonathan Strange will always be attracted to the wildest, most perilous forms of magic. He becomes fascinated by the ancient, shadowy figure of the Raven King, a child taken by fairies who became king of both England and Faerie, and the most legendary magician of all. Eventually Strange's heedless pursuit of long-forgotten magic threatens to destroy not only his partnership with Norrell, but everything that he holds dear.

Sophisticated, witty, and ingeniously convincing, Susanna Clarke's magisterial novel weaves magic into a flawlessly detailed vision of historical England. She has created a world so thoroughly enchanting that eight hundred pages leave readers longing for more.

Publisher's Comments:

What do you do when your son is bullied? How far will you go to protect him from those who seek to cause him harm? Jamie is thirteen years old, an only child. His mother has recently died. He and his father Sam have moved to Sam's home town. A fresh start. An aunt to lend support. A new job for Sam, a new school for Jamie. But one day Jamie comes home, bearing the scars of every parent's nightmare. Something must be done...So it begins.

Publisher's Comments:

Jan has been dying for six years, bringing his unhappy marriage with Annemieke to an end in middle age. Their sons have given them one last gift, a holiday in the Caribbean. Dorothy and George have also been given a holiday, by their granddaughter - their first and probably last trip overseas. In the rain of Bexhill-on-Sea, two weeks at a beach resort seems irresistible. Alone together, in perfect surroundings, they are unable to escape their troubles, until a few chance events - a disappearance, an assault and a man called Bill Moloney - allow them to make something out of the ashes of their love. This is a different love story - about how there's seldom a 'happily ever after', but sometimes a chance to redeem a life together half-lived.

Publisher's Comments:

Marit Laurens, a young woman of British descent, recently orphaned and newly wed, comes to live with her husband Ben on their farm in an Edenic setting near the border of South Africa. But when guerrilla violence and tragedy visit their lives, Marit finds herself in a tug of war between the local Afrikaaners near the farm and the black workers who live on it. Frightened and confused, she turns to the only person who can offer her friendship - her maid, Tembi. Marit stubbornly determines to run the farm with Tembi's help, until the encroaching civil war brings out their conflicting loyalties and turns their struggle into a fight for their lives. Written with exquisite lyricism and deep insight, this novel offers a profound perspective on what it means to be black and white in a country where both live and feel entitlement. Moving beyond its own time and place, it becomes a universal story of the price of freedom.

Publisher's Comments:

Gerald Samper, an effete Englishman and ghostwriter for celebrities, lives on a hilltop in Tuscany. His idyll is shattered by the arrival of Marta, a vulgar woman from the Soviet Republic. The neighbours' lives disastrously intertwine as the English obsession with Tuscany is satirized.

Publisher's Comments:

Arising young screenwriting star in the film world, thirty-year-old Justin Haythe landed squarely on the literary map with his very first publication, a story in "Harper's magazine. In his debut novel, "The Honeymoon, Haythe delivers a deeply observant and nuanced tale, set in London and Venice at the end of the twentieth century, in which a young man looks back on a series of events that have caused his life to unravel. Until the age of twenty-one, American-born Gordon Garrety hasn't reflected much on his unusual and peripatetic childhood, spent largely as the traveling companion of his eccentric mother, Maureen. Only when Gordon meets Annie, several years his senior and the daughter of a cabdriver from North London, does he begin to emerge from the sphere of his mother's influence. The first time they meet, Gordon and Annie make love in a park and soon after are married. Over the course of a year in London, Gordon and Annie construct for themselves an idea of married life, into which Maureen's restless spirit occasionally intrudes. Accompanied by Maureen and her bibulous Swiss fiance, Gerhardt, Annie and Gordon finally take their long-delayed honeymoon to Venice, where they are instantly seduced by the world's most unlikely city. Yet the brilliance of Venice seems to distort rather than illuminate, and the story gathers a palpable intensity before a single act of absurd but devastating violence pricks their happy bubble and lays bare the emptiness at the core of their gilded lives. Beautifully crafted, gently funny, and genuinely surprising, Justin Haythe's remarkably assured debut will astound readers with its dead-on depiction of the dangers of desultory and privileged lives.

Publisher's Comments:

The Great Fire is Shirley Hazzard's first novel since The Transit of Venus, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1981. The conflagration of her title is the Second World War. In war-torn Asia and stricken Europe, men and women, still young but veterans of harsh experience, must reinvent their lives and expectations, and learn, from their past, to dream again. Some will fulfill their destinies, others will falter. At the centre of the story, a brave and brilliant soldier finds that survival and worldly achievement are not enough. His counterpart, a young girl living in Occupied Japan and tending her dying brother, falls in love, and in the process discovers herself. In the looming shadow of world enmities resumed, and of Asia's coming centrality in world affairs, a man and a woman seek to recover self-reliance, balance, and tenderness, struggling to reclaim their humanity.

Publisher's Comments:

In 1860, when they are just eight and ten, Lucy Strange and her brother Thomas are orphaned. Left now in the care of their uncle, the children begin slowly, frighteningly, to find their place in the difficult world. And so begins Lucy's adolescent journey of discovery, one which will take her away from her childhood home in Australia, first to London, then to Bombay and, finally, to her death, at the age of twenty-three. It is a life abbreviated, but not a life diminished. Lucy is a remarkable character, forthright, gifted and exuberant; she touches the lives of all who know her. Written in confident, finely interwoven and intricate layers, Sixty Lights is the powerful chronicle of a modern and independent young woman's life in the Victorian world. Objects evoke memories and hint at the future in a narrative that flows between pleats in time. Through her observation of such objects Lucy's photographic vision is apparent. Her world is a series of still images which one day, printed on albumen paper, she will leave as affecting mementoes of her own extraordinary life.

Publisher's Comments:

The setting is present day London; a familiar scene you may think, but the people who inhabit this London are not the office workers, the shoppers, who form the lifeblood of the city, but those who move around its edges, the dispossessed, who live quite a different existence, under the tunnels and the waste grounds that the rest of us hurry by. Some are refugees, some are escaping from the blanket of domesticity; some have fallen through violence. They all try to survive. Nio a young Greek man has built a hidden home in Coldfall Woods, near St Pancras Cemetery. Mila, a spirited Romanian refugee lives with her family in a huddle of caravans near the North Circular Road. Nio is a dreamer, Mila is feisty. Together they will take on this ragged life; together they will win. But theirs is not an easy city. Their London exacts a hard tribute. There are pitfalls in this London, from which the dispossessed, however strong their will, find hard to recover. A wonderful, heartwarming, heartbreaking tale of a love that takes on all that such a city might throw at it.

Publisher's Comments:

A young Englishman visits Cold War Leipzig with a group of students and, during his brief excursion behind the Iron Curtain, falls for an East German girl who is only just beginning to wake up to the way her society is governed. Her situation touches him, but he is too frightened to help. He spends the next 19 years pretending to himself that he is not in love until one day, with Germany now united, he decides to go back and look for her. But who was she, how will his actions have affected her and how will he find her? All he knows of her identity is the nickname he gave to her - Snowleg.

Nicholas Shakespeare's first novel since The Dancer Upstairs is a powerful love story that explores the close, fraught relationship between England and Germany, between a man who grows up believing himself to be a chivalrous English public-schoolboy and a woman who tries to live loyally under a regime where every move is not only recorded, but where a person's scent may be secretly bottled, labeled and stored away until such time as she needs to be traced.

Publisher's Comments:

Who or what is Cherry? Steve Ellis doesn't know and he's beginning not to care. All he knows is that as soon as his perfect woman came into his life all the flatness and misery went away. But happiness comes with a price. When you meet a man in a bar and he arranges for you to fall in love there's bound to be some strings attached. Steve might be suspicious about playing along with the game, but he's convinced he can handle it, a belief that may well lead to his downfall ... Some people will do anything for love ... or what they think is love. Anything. In Steve Ellis Matt Thorne gives us a uniquely memorable fictional creation, and this arresting new novel is a haunting study of what can happen when your dream partner enters your life.

Chris Smith (Chair), Tibor Fischer, Robert Macfarlane, Rowan Pelling, and Fiammetta Rocco.