2004 Man Booker Prize Longlist

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.

A tour de force in the tradition of Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor and Chatterton, a gripping novel of betrayal and deceit set in the teeming streets of nineteenth-century London .

'Investigating other people's tragedies and cock-ups and misfortunes was all he knew. He was used to being a voyeur, the outsider looking in, and nothing, but nothing, that anyone did surprised him any more. Yet despite everything he'd seen and done, inside Jackson there remained a belief - a small, battered and bruised belief - that his job was to help people be good rather than punish them for being bad.'

Cambridge is sweltering, during an unusually hot summer. To Jackson Brodie, former police inspector turned private investigator, the world consists of one accounting sheet - Lost on the left, Found on the right - and the two never seem to balance. His days are full of people clamouring for answers and explanations. A jealous husband suspects his wife. Two spinster sisters make a shocking find. A solicitor investigates an old murder. A nurse has lost her niece; a widow, her cats.

Jackson has never felt at home in Cambridge , and has a failed marriage to prove it. He is forty-five but feels much, much older. He is at that dangerous age when men suddenly notice that they're going to die eventually, inevitably, and there isn't a damn thing they can do about it. Surrounded by death, intrigue and misfortune, his own life is brought sharply into focus.

Ingeniously plotted, full of suspense and heartbreak, CASE HISTORIES is a feat of bravura storytelling that conveys the mysteries of life, its inanities and its hilarities. It is a life-affirming work of profound insight and intelligence.

The only debut novel to be short-listed for the Booker Prize in 2001, The Hiding Place became a national bestseller and established Trezza Azzopardi as an international sensation. With her second novel, Remember Me , Azzopardi delivers a harrowing, elegant, and vivid portrait of a lost life at last reclaimed.

Seventy-two-year-old Winnie — homeless and abandoned time and again by those she's trusted — would say she's no trouble. She is content to let the days go by, minding her own business, bothering no one. Winnie would rather not recall the past and at her age doesn't see much point in thinking about the future. But she is catapulted out of her exile when a young girl robs her of her suitcase and her wig — Winnie's only material possessions. With nothing else to show for her life, these few pieces are irreplaceable to her; she wants them back. Winnie then embarks on a journey to find the thief, and what begins as a search for stolen belongings becomes the rediscovery of a stolen life.

Forced to take stock of how events long buried have brought her to a derelict house on the edge of nowhere, she relives the secrets of a past she had disowned. From her childhood in the 1930s and the upheaval caused by a feuding family, to the dislocation caused by World War II, and finally to the days leading up to her "fall," Winnie recalls a series of revelations and betrayals so disturbing it is no wonder she was driven out of normal society and onto the streets. As she pieces together the fragments of her life, her once secluded world begins to fill with people — including her devoted father, the haunting figure of her mother, and her domineering grandfather — and Winnie recognizes that she is no longer simply on a hunt for stolen goods. After all these years, she has not escaped from her life at all: she has been circling it, and must now come to terms with it.

The sequel to A Star Called Henry , the second volume in Roddy Doyle's epic trilogy about Henry Smart and the making of modern Ireland.

After months of rain, a city is sinking under the floods. The rich live much as usual, but the poor are cut off, while the fanatical "Last Days" religious sect is recruiting thousands. When the rain suddenly stops, a spectacular gala takes place to which the swarming characters of this book flock.

An Indian myth says that when the river Ganges first descended from the heavens, the force of the cascade was so great that the earth would have been destroyed if it had not been for the god Shiva, who tamed the torrent by catching it in his dreadlocks. It is only when the Ganges approaches the Bay of Bengal that it frees itself and separates into thousands of wandering strands. The result is the Sundarbans, an immense stretch of mangrove forest, a half-drowned land where the waters of the Himalayas merge with the incoming tides of the sea.

It is this vast archipelago of islands that provides the setting for Amitav Ghosh's new novel. In the Sundarbans the tides reach more than 100 miles inland and every day thousands of hectares of forest disappear only to re-emerge hours later. Dense as the mangrove forests are, from a human point of view it is only a little less barren than a desert. There is a terrible, vengeful beauty here, a place teeming with crocodiles, snakes, sharks and man-eating tigers. This is the only place on earth where man is more often prey than predator.

And it is into this terrain that an eccentric, wealthy Scotsman named Daniel Hamilton tried to create a utopian society, of all races and religions, and conquer the might of the Sundarbans. In January 2001, a small ship arrives to conduct an ecological survey of this vast but little-known environment, and the scientists on board begin to trace the journeys of the descendants of this society.

Beginning as a humble apprentice in Morecambe Bay , Cy flees to America , where he sets up his own tattoo business on the infamous Coney Island boardwalk. In this carnival environment of roller-coasters and freak shows, Cy becomes enamoured with Grace, a mysterious circus performer.

In the summer of 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby-whom Nick had idolized at Oxford -and Catherine, highly critical of her family's assumptions and ambitions.

As the boom years of the eighties unfold, Nick, an innocent in the world of politics and money, finds his life altered by the rising fortunes of this glamorous family. His two vividly contrasting love affairs, one with a young black clerk and one with a Lebanese millionaire, dramatize the dangers and rewards of his own private pursuit of beauty, a pursuit as compelling to Nick as the desire for power and riches among his friends. Richly textured, emotionally charged, disarmingly comic, this U.K. bestseller is a major work by one of our finest writers.

For her first novel in more than nine years, in a career of distinctive and unique accomplishments, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has written a most unusual book. My Nine Lives is "Chapters of a Possible Past," as the subtitle declares. It is, as the author has commented, a book filled with "invented memories." Nine vignettes — autobiographical fictions — are linked to portray a rich life, filled with searching, from London to Delhi , from Hollywood to New York . Each chapter gathers a different cast of characters, some new and some vaguely familiar, and the linked assembly is as exciting and illuminating as an artist's first show at a Chelsea gallery or a new play at the Studio Theater.

After seventeen books, now in her seventy-seventh year, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala takes on as her subject herself, the life she may have or may have wished to live. My Nine Lives is a moving and intriguing book of invention and memory.

Thomas Keneally's literary achievements have been inspired by some of history's most intriguing events and characters, but in a rare reversal of time his brilliantly imagined new novel takes us into a near future that uncannily is all too familiar.

In a detention camp where he is neither granted asylum nor readied to be sent back to his native land, a detainee bides his time. He insists on being called Alan Sheriff, a westernization of his given name; he was born in a country that had once been a friend to the United States but is now its enemy. Little else is known about Sheriff until a writer comes to interview him. Sheriff decides that the time is right to tell his visitor his story and embarks on the unraveling of events that have led to his current state with extraordinary detail — the basis of which forms this novel within a novel.

Sheriff is a celebrated novelist in a country in which its brutal leader orders Sheriff to ghostwrite a work of fiction: an uneasy combination of invention, autobiography, and polemic — the very publication of which would overturn Western sanctions and shame the United States . The deadline is impossible, but the government enforcers guard his house and stalk his every move. It is not long before Sheriff becomes the tyrant's caged canary, as he races against the deadline that threatens to cost him everything and everyone he holds dear.

In a work reminiscent of the classic Fahrenheit 451 , Thomas Keneally has written a dazzling story of a man caught between the demands of his government and his impulse to run for his life. Provocative and possibly prophetic, The Tyrant's Novel is a literary achievement inspired by recent history's most intriguing events and characters. Here, Keneally once more combines, as he did in Schindler's List , his fictional talent with his engagement in world politics.

Hannah Luckraft knows the taste of paradise. It's hidden in the peace of open country, it's sweet on her lover's skin, it flavours every drink she's ever taken, but it never seems to stay. Almost forty and with nothing to show for it, even Hannah is starting to notice that her lifestyle is not entirely sustainable: her subconscious is turning against her and it may be that her soul is a little unwell. Her family is wounded, her friends are frankly odd, her body is not as reliable as it once was. Robert, a dissolute dentist, appears to offer a love she can understand, but he may only be one more symptom of the problem she must cure. From the north-east of Scotland to Dublin , from London to Montreal , to Budapest and onwards, Hannah travels beyond her limits, beyond herself, in search of the ultimate altered state: the one where she can be happy - her paradise. Incapable of writing a dull sentence, or failing to balance the grim with the hilarious, the tender with the shocking, A.L. Kennedy has written an emotional and visceral tour-de-force. A compelling examination of failure that is also a comic triumph, a novel of dark extremes that is full of the most ravishing lyrical beauty, Paradise is the finest book yet by one of Britain's most extraordinarily gifted writers.

When Hari Kunzru's eagerly awaited first novel, The Impressionist , was published, it was lauded and celebrated worldwide. In that rich, wry debut, Kunzru probed the realms of culture and identity through a savvy boy's attempts to reconcile the roles of his British father and his passionate Indian mother. Now, in Transmission , Kunzru takes an ultra-contemporary turn while introducing another tragicomic protagonist: an Indian computer programmer whose luxurious fantasies about life in America are shaken when he accepts a California job offer.

Lonely and naive, Arjun bides his time as an assistant virus tester, pining for a free-loving looker named Christine and building digital creatures in a feeble attempt to enhance his job security. But, like so many of his Silicon Valley peers, Arjun gets fired. In an act of innocent desperation to keep his job and the woman he loves, he releases a mischievous and destructive virus around the globe. World order unravels, as does Arjun's sanity, in a rollicking cataclysm that even manages to involve Bollywood — and, not so coincidentally, the glamorous star of Arjun's favorite Indian movie.

As stylish, perceptive, and wicked as the writings of his ranking contemporaries Zadie Smith and Jonathan Safran Foer, Transmission brilliantly proves that Hari Kunzru is an author with limitless imaginative skill and boundless storytelling talent.

Matthew Viss just wants to help. That's all he ever wanted. He works at The Greatest Gift - the city's premier concierge service. Whether you need a limo to the airport, or someone to run your whole life, Matthew can help. This is the story of Matthew's downfall.

Jerry McGuinty is a simple, self-made builder who claims he can plaster a wall that will change your life. Simon Struthers is a disaffected businessman who proves the old adage about money and happiness. Together they face the new Ottawa of the seventies: brash, bright, and ready for the taking.

With their different careers and successes, these two strangers seek to carve out their own happiness-Jerry with his new wife, Simon with his endless affairs and intrigues. But love can be suffocated by the drive to succeed, and individuals crushed by greed and progress. Only when both men realize what they have to lose will their lives finally intersect, and the story spiral to its astonishing conclusion.

Patrick McGrath is a writer of astonishing accomplishment: "fiction of a depth and power we hardly hope to encounter anymore," according to Tobias Wolff, with "the drive and suspense of the most shameless thriller [and] the inevitability of myth."

Port Mungo , his sixth novel, is a harrowing story of art and love, and of a family cursed by both. Throughout a privileged, eccentric childhood, Jack Rathbone enjoyed the constant adoration of his sister, Gin. So at art school in London , she is pained to see him fall under the spell of Vera Savage, a spectacularly bohemian painter with whom he soon runs off to New York City . From a bruised, bereft distance, Gin follows their southward progress through Miami and prerevolutionary Havana to Port Mungo, a seedy river town in the mangrove swamps along the Gulf of Honduras . Here Jack discovers himself as an artist, and begins to work with a fervor as intense as the restless, boozy waywardness to which Vera gradually succumbs, and which not even the births of two daughters can help to subdue.

Patrick McGrath's mesmerizing narrative tracks these lives from the fifties in England to the nineties in Manhattan: the latter-day Gauguin; his buccaneering mate; the girls, Peg and Anna, left adrift in their wake; and Gin herself, their painstaking chronicler, whose house in Greenwich Village eventually becomes a haven for them all.

This feverish world of tropical impulses, artistic ambition, and love both reckless and enduring leads the Rathbones, ultimately, to a death swathed in mystery, and to another similarly bound in complicit secrecy, as the imperatives of passion, narcissism, and creativity hold each of them — and the reader — in relentless thrall.

The comforts and terrors of middle-class provincial life have seldom been more sharply dissected than by Stanley Middleton, and his new novel adds to this social insight a new poignancy. As ageing slowly entwines John Stone, retired headmaster at Beechnall, his wife Peg and their various friends and relatives, and as past certainties recede, the solid, decent world of provincial life with its satisfactions and occasional minor adulteries gives way to new threats - some external, in the changing society around them, some internal. The question of how to live the good life, always near the centre of Middleton's novels, confronts the inhabitants of this quiet street of Victorian villas and is answered in surprising and disturbing ways.

From David Mitchell, the Booker Prize nominee, award-winning writer and one of the featured authors in Granta's "Best of Young British Novelists 2003" issue, comes his highly anticipated third novel, a work of mind-bending imagination and scope.

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 civilization — the narrators of Cloud Atlas hear each other's echoes down the corridor of history, and their destinies are changed in ways great and small.

In his captivating third novel, David Mitchell erases the boundaries of language, genre and time to offer a meditation on humanity's dangerous will to power, and where it may lead us.

Willy Chandra - whom we first met in Half a Life - is a man who has allowed one identity after another to be thrust upon him. Now, in his early 40s, after a peripatetic life, he succumbs to the demanding encouragement of his sister - and his own listlessness - and joins an underground movement in India ostensibly devoted to unfettering the lower castes. But seven years of revolutionary campaigns and several years in jail convince him that the revolution "had nothing to do with the village people we said we were fighting for," and he feels himself further than ever "from his own history and...from the ideas of himself that might have come to him with that history." When he returns to England where, 30 years before, his psychological and physical wanderings began, he finds the fruit of another unexpected social revolution (more magic seeds), and he comes to see himself as a man "serving an endless prison sentence" - a revelation that may finally release him into his true self. Magic Seeds is a masterpiece, written with all the depth and resonance, the clarity of vision and precision of language that are the hallmarks of this brilliant writer.

Great Britain . 1984. The miners' strike. It is the closest Britain has come to civil war in fifty years, setting the government against the people.

David Peace's sweeping, bloody and dramatic fictional portrait of the year that left an indelible mark on the nation's consciousness covers a broad and unexpected canvas of characters. In his trademark visceral prose, Peace describes the insidious workings of the boardroom negotiations and the increasingly anarchic coalfield battles; the struggle for influence in government and the dwindling powers of the NUM; and the corruption, intrigue and dirty tricks which run through the whole like a fault in a seam of coal.

Stylish, riveting and appalling, ‘GB84' is a shocking fictional documentation of the violence, sleaze and fraudulence that characterised Thatcher's Britain . David Peace has written a novel extraordinary in its reach, and unflinching in its capacity to recreate the brutality and passion that changed the course of British history in the late twentieth century.

In 1978, gifted student and writer Greg Roberts turned to heroin when his marriage collapsed, feeding his addiction with a string of robberies. Caught and convicted, he was given a nineteen-year sentence. After two years, he escaped from a maximum- security prison, spending the next ten years on the run as Australia 's most wanted man. Hiding in Bombay , he established a medical clinic for slum- dwellers, worked in the Bollywood film industry and served time in the notorious Arthur Road prison. He was recruited by one of the most charismatic branches of the Bombay mafia for whom he worked as a forger, counterfeiter, and smuggler, and fought alongside a unit of mujaheddin guerrilla fighters in Afghanistan . His debut novel, Shantaram, is based on this ten-year period of his life in Bombay . The result is an epic tale of slums and five-star hotels, romantic love and prison torture, mafia gang wars and Bollywood films. A gripping adventure story, Shantaram is also a superbly written meditation on good and evil and an authentic evocation of Bombay life.

In a small flat in London , a young man is turning to gold. But before he dies, before his skin and eyes and tongue harden into a golden death mask, he wants to share the amazing story of his life. Born and raised on the barren Orkney Islands off the coast of Scotland , his childhood is a brutal one, devoid of tenderness. It is a miracle when he meets Tracy , falls in love, and discovers his true gift: the merest touch of him is enough to induce visions of angels and orchids. The physical heights he is able to reach-and to which he can bring others-go far beyond any normal sensual pleasure. Armed with this inexplicable talent, he makes his way to London , where he falls in with a group of teens forced to make a living on the street.

Luke Sutherland's modern-day myth about the power of love veers from stratosphere to gutter, from visions of heaven to the all-too-mortal yearning for even one glimpse of it. With "Venus as a Boy Sutherland has written a moving, poetic novel that manages to imbue the harsh realities of life on the street with a mesmerizing and ethereal beauty.

Like Michael Cunningham in The Hours, Colm Tóibín captures the extraordinary mind and heart of a great writer. Brilliant and profoundly moving, The Master tells the story of Henry James, a man born into one of America 's first intellectual families two decades before the Civil War. James left his country to live in Paris , Rome , Venice , and London among privileged artists and writers.

In stunningly resonant prose, Tóibín captures the loneliness and longing, the hope and despair of a man who never married, never resolved his sexual identity, and whose forays into intimacy inevitably failed him and those he tried to love. The emotional intensity of Tóibín's portrait of James is riveting. Time and again, James, a master of psychological subtlety in his fiction, proves blind to his own heart and incapable of reconciling his dreams of passion with his own fragility.

Tóibín is "a great and humanizing writer" who describes complex relationships in "supple, beautifully modulated prose" ( The Washington Post Book World ). In The Master, he has written his most ambitious and heartbreaking novel, an extraordinarily inventive encounter with a character at the cusp of the modern age, elusive to his own friends and even family, yet astonishingly vivid in these pages.

A wickedly savage satire on the morality of contemporary Britain , doing for today what Evelyn Waugh did for the thirties and Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities did for the eighties.

“Had Father Vivyan been killed by his own pride and fanaticism; by his belief that he could ‘save' a dangerous and mentally unstable boy? Had he been killed by his own fanatical political posture, his alliance with those whom the rest of the world saw as terrorists?… Or had he been destroyed by the right wing press, and in particular by Lennox Mark, the proprietor of the Legion? Perhaps by a bit of all these things…”

A.N. Wilson has written a savage satire on the morality of contemporary Britain -- its press, its politics, its Church, its rich, its underclass. His London is a bleak, if occasionally hilarious, place: murderous, randy, money-obsessed and haunted by strange gods.

Motherless and anchorless, Silver is taken in by the timeless Mr. Pew, keeper of the Cape Wrath lighthouse. Pew tells Silver ancient tales of longing and rootlessness, of ties that bind and of the slippages that occur throughout every life. One life, Babel Dark's, a nineteenth century clergyman, opens like a map that Silver must follow. Caught in her own particular darknesses, she embarks on an Ulyssean sift through the stories we tell ourselves, stories of love and loss, of passion and longing, stories of unending journeys that move through places and times, and the bleak finality of the shores of betrayal. But finally,
"I love you.
The most difficult words in the world.
But what else can I say?"
A story of mutability, of talking birds and stolen books, of Darwin and Stevenson and of the Jekyll and Hyde in all of us, Lighthousekeeping is a way in to the rooms of our own that we secretly inhabit. Jeanette Winterson is one of the most extraordinary and original writers of her generation and this shows her at her lyrical best.