- 1969 -- Something to Answer For by P. H. Newby -- Who? Shockingly good. Graham Greene crossed with Steve Erickson: Personal and political melt into a man without memory. Appropriate that the Booker was a newbie.
- 1970 -- The Elected Member by Bernice Rubens -- Abraham and Sarah raise a different sort of dysfunctional brood. This is Sholem Aleichem's "Tevya and His Daughters" made into a wonderfully contemporary, psychological novel.
- 1971 -- In a Free State by V. S. Naipaul -- No one writes better about how oppression oppresses everyone it touches, including the oppressor. The book's last section is subtly complex and brilliantly nuanced. Marvelous.
- 1972 -- G. by John Berger -- Truly a reader's book, with hints of Marx and Stendhal and Robbe-Grillet hiding within. No one mixes reason and art like Berger, every sentence intriguing.
- 1973 -- The Siege of Krishnapur by J. G. Farrell -- Start with a measure of stupid British commercial imperialism, add spoonfuls of ironic heroism, Anglican bible-thumping, and Victorian sexual naiveté. A real romance of cynicism.
- 1974 (shared) -- The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer -- Everyone talks about Gordimer and race in South Africa, but she's an incomparable artist with words, on every page a gem worth repeating to friends.
- 1974 (shared) -- Holiday by Stanley Middleton -- Middleton shows consummate craft in an exploration of marriage told in flashback. So many Bookers take place near water; it should be the (Sea)Man Booker.
- 1975 -- Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala -- Hard to believe that this book was written by a German-Jewish woman from Britain. A stingingly vivid embedding of alienation in an alienating country.
- 1976 -- Saville by David Storey -- I love British class-accent-based coming-of-age novels that civilly depict uncivilized behavior. Sons and Lovers without the paternal abuse and Lawrence's overbearing ideology, an immerging story.
- 1977 -- Staying On by Paul Scott -- This belongs to the "What were we thinking?" School of British Literature. It's not post-colonial, it's post-purpose. Read it with Scott's Raj Quartet: They intersect.
- 1978 -- The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch -- Insightful story of a retired man who pretends that forty years of an unfulfilled life do not exist. Intellectually intriguing and emotionally compelling: A masterpiece.
- 1979 -- Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald -- Creeps up on you, like the tide, with great story rhythms. Chock-full of pathos, few sentences stand out, but the whole makes up for it.
- 1980 -- Rites of Passage by William Golding -- When historical fiction overlays contemporary sensibilities onto the past instead of trying to approximate that era's sensibilities (see The French Lieutenant's Woman), a corker results.
- 1981 -- Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie -- Winner of the Booker of Bookers (twenty-fifth and fortieth anniversaries). Not only one of the best but most representative of what the Bookers look for.
- 1982 -- Schindler's List (published in the U.K. as Schindler's Ark) by Thomas Keneally -- Novel? History? Doesn't matter. Keneally smartly situates victims and survivors at the center. Powerful reminder of when compassion battles brutality…and wins…but only sometimes.
- 1983 -- Life & Times of Michael K by J. M. Coetzee -- It may be a cliché, but this book is like a traffic accident observed in slow motion. You grimace constantly but you can't look away.
- 1984 -- Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner -- As languidly sensual as the English get (again with the water!). In America they would call this a "snowbound" book, a modern classic of regret.
- 1985 -- The Bone People by Keri Hulme -- Reads like it was tapped out on a manual typewriter in a wilderness shack by a first-timer. Visceral and affecting. Among the Bookers, sui generis.
- 1986 -- The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis -- Codgers and regrets go together like horses and carriages. Not Amis's best, but it's a cohesive portrait of aging curmudgeons by the quintessential aging curmudgeon.
- 1987 -- Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively -- The most attractive, unrepentant female curmudgeon ever, passionate sex, intellectually exciting, and socially upending. My first Fitzgerald: couldn't put it down, will read it again.
- 1988 -- Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey -- Carey specializes in extraordinary people in uncivilized environments. His language grows more ambitious with each book, with greater risks and more accomplishment. Read 'em all.
- 1989 -- The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro -- I have read three perfect novels in my life, and this is one of them. The British class system as realism, symbolism, and metaphor. Brilliant.
- 1990 -- Possession by A. S. Byatt -- One hopes that literary prizes get it right sometimes. This is one of those times. Read slowly and carefully, and don't skip over the poetry.
- 1991 -- The Famished Road by Ben Okri -- Raises the coming-of-age novel to the thrill of epic, candidate for the Great Nigerian Novel. Okri is a worthy successor to Achebe, predecessor to Adichie.
- 1992 (shared) -- Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth -- A post-swashbuckling saga of corrupt antiheroes on the Main, highly structured and powerfully languaged, a call-and-response plotting of moral relativism before the British abolition of slavery's Triangle Trade.
- 1992 (shared) -- The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje -- The love stories twist you in knots while the beauty of Ondaatje's language creates an internal landscape to match the sublime vastness of the desert.
- 1993 -- Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle -- The title explains much of it. A kid's romp in the not-quite-mean streets, and one of the best evocations of the "loomingness" of childhood.
- 1994 -- How Late It Was, How Late by James Kelman -- Who hasn't awakened in an alley missing his shoes? Portrait of the downsliding of a soon-to-be down-and-out, the prose style mirrors the story's blithery content.
- 1995 -- The Ghost Road by Pat Barker -- One of the best "if war is hell then the First World War is heller" subgenre books of political conflict writing. Like someone's dark soul imprinted.
- 1996 -- Last Orders by Graham Swift -- A really affecting novel of community and regret, though since The Big Lebowski no one can throw a crematee into the sea without comic relief.
- 1997 -- The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy -- One of those books that people say you should read because of its themes; instead, read it (aloud) for the sheer pleasure of hearing words.
- 1998 -- Amsterdam by Ian McEwan -- McEwan is Britain's big-concept, zeitgeist writer, whose personal stories engage with political ideas. Always intelligent and readable, Amsterdam's his take on death and dying.
- 1999 -- Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee -- Coetzee could win the Man Booker with every book. A man steadily loses control; in the face of gathering darkness, his social presence turns translucent.
- 2000 -- The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood -- Character-driven and illusive, the dissatisfactions of women intertwine in the fictions they tell themselves and one another through the generations. Kate Chopin meets Robertson Davies.
- 2001 -- True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey -- For Americans, a revelation that other places had legendary bandits (Robin Hood? Joaquin Murrieta?). Carey's fabulous style creates a link between language and life story.
- 2002 -- Life of Pi by Yann Martell -- The fable that made the Booker fabulous, mingling Robinson Crusoe, Steinbeck's story "Lifeboat," Animal Planet, and Khalil Gibran. Don't believe the overhype: It reads good.
- 2003 -- Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre -- The least British British novel I've ever read. Absorbing, more Denis Johnson than Samuel Johnson, with gangly prose as if written by a stringy convict.
- 2004 -- The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst -- Class and sex, sex and class. It beautifully brings out the status of gay men as "ethnics," in an otherwise traditional British tale of "passing."
- 2005 -- The Sea by John Banville -- Another Booker about old men and the sea (see Murdoch, 1978). Few novelists write more beautiful prose than Banville…and most of them are dead.
- 2006 -- The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai -- It's hard not to admire this book. A big, heart-rending story of Indians who leave and Indians who stay, and those who came and went.
- 2007 -- The Gathering by Anne Enright -- Very earnest story of sex, death, family, and middle-age desire. The sentences are so astoundingly ambitious that their risk-taking beauty can keep you from sobbing.
- 2008 -- The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga -- Surprisingly good, because some literary pundits badmouthed it for lack of complexity. The best of what happens when a journalist writes a socially relevant novel.
- 2009 -- Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel -- English history is a fetish for the Brits, like Star Wars for the Yanks: They love to parade in costumes and jostle with their (anti)heroes.
- 2010 -- The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson -- We've been waiting 800 years for the British Messiah, but instead of a messiah we get messhugah. Also read Kalooki Nights. It's even better.
- 2011-- The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
oct 17 2011 ∞
nov 19 2012 +
nov 19 2012 +