Mural at Vesuvio bar on Columbus Avenue, San Francisco (next door to City Lights Bookstore). Copyright © 2005 Deborah McIntosh

Several years ago I rediscovered my love of fiction. In an effort to broaden my horizons beyond the Canadian writers to whom I habitually turned, I set myself a challenge: to read every winner of the Man Booker Prize since its inception in 1969. This has been an education, both in terms of introducing me to new authors and illuminating some interesting trends in English language novels over the thirty-seven years the prize has been awarded.

Amongst the books listed below are some of the best I've ever read. Booker-winners defy easy generalization, aside from the obvious: eligibility for the prize is limited to books written in English by citizens of the fifty-three countries of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland. Nonetheless, certain trends have emerged over the years. Beginning in the 1990s, many Booker winners and shortlisted books were set in postcolonial places and times, or written from that perspective (memorable examples: Damon Galgut's The Good Doctor, J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things) and Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss). Moreover, since the mid-1990s, a number of Booker-winners have featured unusually gritty subject matter (e.g. James Kelman's How Late It Was, How Late and DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little).

Although there are eighteen African nations represented in the Commonwealth, the Booker has been awarded to only one African novelist from outside South Africa: Nigerian author Ben Okri for his 1991 The Famished Road. African novelists rarely even make the short or longlists, a notable recent exception being Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for Purple Hibiscus. (South African novelists have twice won the Booker: Nadine Gordimer was an early winner in 1974 for The Conservationist, and Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee is a two-time winner, taking the 1983 prize for Life & Times of Michael K. and the 1999 prize for Disgrace.) Michael Ondaatje was the first Canadian to win the Booker, for his 1992 The English Patient, followed by Margaret Atwood in 2000 and Yann Martel in 2002. If you want to win the Booker, your best bet is still to be English, as were twenty-two of the thirty-five winners since 1969.

Thus far my three favourite Booker winners are Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin and Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger. The book I think was least deserving of the Booker is Ian McEwan's Amsterdam (though I did like Atonement, which was shortlisted in 2001).

Thanks very much to inkognitoh for sending me The Man Booker Prize: 35 Years of the Best in Contemporary Fiction. Published by the Booker Prize Foundation in 2003, this book contains some great Booker-related trivia (e.g. in 1977 Booker judge Philip Larkin threatened to jump out a window if Paul Scott's Staying On wasn't selected for the Booker, which -- mercifully -- it was).

Booker-winners I've read appear below in bold, followed by a short description and review. Hyperlinked titles were released through BookCrossing.com.

• 2007

  Anne Enright - The Gathering - read November 2008.
  The Gathering is a highly readable story about three generations of the Dublin-based Hegarty family, told from the point of view of thirty-nine year old Veronica, one of the middle children in a family of twelve. As the book begins, Veronica is travelling from Dublin to southern England, where she must collect the remains of her brother Liam, who has drowned at the age of forty. The family will soon collect in the home of their Mammy, a faded, tranquilized, ghost-like presence from whom everyone keeps any news likely to be distressing. Veronica, who was the closest to Liam, has information about her brother's life which she connects to the reason for his death, and most of the novel is an extended contemplation on the multi-generational force of family secrets.

  From the 2007 Booker shortlist: On Chesil Beach - Ian McEwan ;

  From the 2007 Booker longlist: What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn ;

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• 2006

  Kiran Desai - The Inheritance of Loss - read December 2006.
  The Inheritance of Loss begins in 1986, and tells the story of Jemubhai Popatlal Patel, "the judge", who lives with his cook and his seventeen year old granddaughter, Sai Mistry, in a house called Cho Oyu in the hill station of Kalimpong in the Himalayan foothills. Born to a peasant family in 1919, Judge Patel was schooled at mission schools before winning scholarships to Bishop's College and Cambridge. Upon his return to India he became a member of the pre-independence Indian Civil Service.

  At the age of six Sai was sent to the convent of St. Augustine's, where her mother had also once been a student, while her Hindu mother and Zoroastrian father -- a member of the Indian Air Force -- relocated to Moscow, her father as a possible candidate for the Russian space program. By the time Sai was eight she hadn't seen her parents for two years, and when she received news they'd been crushed under the wheels of a bus in Moscow she could barely remember them (later Sai is described as the "orphan child of India's failing romance with the Soviets"). At seventeen, Sai still lives with her grandfather and his cook at Cho Oyu, and is romantically involved with Gyan, her mathematics tutor.

  The characters coexist in relative harmony, until the peace in Kalimpong is threatened by Nepalese insurgents. Thus The Inheritance of Loss is about independence and counter-independence movements, the multi-generational fall-out of the Indian diaspora, colonization, globalization, disappointment and -- as the title suggests -- loss. This is a true twenty-first century novel, full of insight and critical commentary about the state of the world, and full of compassion for its characters. Highly recommended.

  From the 2006 Booker shortlist: The Secret River by Kate Grenville ;

  From the 2006 Booker longlist: Black Swan Green by David Mitchell ;

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• 2005

  John Banville - The Sea - read March 2007.
  Max Morden, a sixty-something year old art historian whose specialty is the work of Pierre Bonnard, has just lost his wife to abdominal cancer. In his grief, he returns to the site of a childhood summer vacation on the Irish coast. There he contemplates the trajectory of his life, an arc spanning from his first teenage relationship to his wife Anna's last days, probing the memories of his neighbours, torturing metaphors from the movement of the sea and drinking brandy -- lots of it.

  Max is as lost, angry and self-involved as anyone who has just seen a spouse through a year-long cancer battle might be expected to be. His recurrent contemplation of a pivotal childhood summer (including a particular event which -- for obvious reasons -- imprinted deeply on his psyche) provides some relief from his feelings of anger towards his wife, but ultimately the conundrum raised by each event is the same: how to survive loss, how to reconcile it with the reality of living in the aftermath.

  The Sea is a simple and beautifully written story, full of vividly portrayed characters with interesting shadow sides. I wouldn't have picked it for the Booker myself, but I enjoyed reading it very much.

  From the 2005 Booker shortlist: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro ;

  From the 2005 Booker longlist: A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka ;

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• 2004

  Alan Hollinghurst - The Line of Beauty - read August 2005.
  The Line of Beauty tells the story of Nick Guest, just down from Oxford and twenty-one years old as the book begins in 1983, and living as a lodger in the home of wealthy Conservative MP Gerald Fedden and his family. The book follows the lives of Nick, the Feddens, and the cast of super-privileged Tory friends, politicians and business men with whom they associate, over the course of four eventful years -- until the whole edifice of lies, pretences and flawed relationships seems to crumble around them in the fall of 1987.

  The prevalence of gay sex scenes in the first third of the novel anticipates the looming AIDS epidemic, still somewhat remote in 1983. Faithful to the reality of the times, Hollinghurst makes no direct mention of the disease until about three hundred pages into the novel, though there are references to some minor gay characters getting unaccountably thinner, and to a friend-of-a-friend's unnamed terminal illness. The reader nonetheless senses what's coming, and indeed it does, just as it did in real life: with the first knowledge of an infected distant acquaintance, followed by the realization that the disease had touched a closer friend or colleague, then finally someone much closer to home. The Line of Beauty evokes the atmosphere of shame and isolation that surrounded that first wave of infection very effectively, and raises important questions about the secrecy, lies and hypocrisy which characterized both the neo-conservative politics of the 1980s and the early days of the AIDS epidemic.

  From the 2004 Booker shortlist: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell ; Bitter Fruit by Achmat Dangor .

  From the 2004 Booker longlist: Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ; Maps for Lost Lovers by Nadeem Aslam ; The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard ; Havoc, in its Third Year by Ronan Bennett .

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• 2003

  DBC Pierre - Vernon God Little - read May 2004.
  Vernon Gregory Little is a high-school student in Martirio, "the barbecue sauce capital of Central Texas". As Vernon God Little begins, he is accused of being an accessory to the shooting of sixteen students at his school, a crime apparently committed by his close friend, Jesus Navarro. (As Vernon puts it, "normal times just ran howling from town".) Martirio is mired in deep, self-indulgent, made-for-TV grief. Cellophane-wrapped teddy bears adorn the lawn of Vernon's bereaved neighbours, who are said to have put them there themselves, since no one actually liked their son. Meanwhile the neighbours are preoccupied with their acquisition of a new "Special Edition" refrigerator -- in almond -- purchased with the insurance money from their son's death.

  Reviewers of Vernon God Little compared Vernon to J.D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield. Indeed the similarities are striking, and perhaps even intentional -- from the first page of the book, Vernon -- like Holden -- uses the expression "ole" (as in "ole Mrs. Lechuga"), and speaks in the first person to "you" ("You'd remember ole ..."). Vernon is portrayed as the lone clear-sighted character in a town which has so long ago lost its soul to mindless consumerism, compulsive overeating and social climbing it seems barely to notice the tragedy in its midst.

  From the 2003 Booker shortlist: Brick Lane by Monica Ali ; The Good Doctor by Damon Galgut ; Notes on a Scandal by Zoë Heller ; Astonishing Splashes of Colour by Clare Morrall

  From the 2003 Booker longlist: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon; The Light of Day by Graham Swift ; Frankie & Stankie by Barbara Trapido ; Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee ; The Romantic by Barbara Gowdy .

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• 2002

  Yann Martel - Life of Pi - read June 2005.
  Life of Pi tells the story of Piscine Molitor -- "Pi" -- Patel (named first after a Parisian swimming pool, then later after 3.14), who was raised in his father's zoo in Pondicherry, India. At the age of sixteen, Pi finds himself cast adrift in the Pacific Ocean in a 26 foot lifeboat when the ship carrying his family and their menagerie to their new home in Canada unexpectedly sinks four days out of Manila. Pi travels the "narrow road" of the Pacific equatorial counter current for 227 days with only Richard Parker -- a 450 lb. Bengal tiger -- for company.

  The story of Pi's accidental voyage with Richard Parker works so well, on so many levels. It would be engaging enough as a book about animal behaviour, since Martel resists -- to the poignant conclusion of the novel -- the temptation to anthropomorphize Richard Parker (his name notwithstanding!). As an adventure story, it brings to mind Robinson Crusoe. As an odyssey and a fable it borrows from Aesop, Homer, the Old Testament and William Blake, to name only a few obvious reference points. Most compellingly, Life of Pi is a remarkably moving account of a spiritual journey. Pi had inclinations in this direction even before the shipwreck (before finishing high school he'd already signed on for three Major World Religions), but his experience at sea consolidates at a deeply personal level all that he'd learned about God -- and godliness -- from books.

  From the 2002 Booker shortlist: Unless by Carol Shields ; Dirt Music by Tim Winton ; The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor .

  From the 2002 Booker longlist: Any Human Heart by William Boyd ; If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things by Jon McGregor .

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• 2001

  Peter Carey - True History of the Kelly Gang - read August 2005.
  True History of the Kelly Gang begins around 1866 when narrator Ned Kelly is twelve years old. Told in the first person in a series of thirteen fictional parcels of loose paper apparently written by Kelly for his daughter (and later transported to Melbourne in a mysterious metal trunk), the novel follows Kelly and the so-called "Kelly Gang" (younger brother Daniel Kelly and friends Joe Byrne and Steven Hart) over a twelve year period, concluding with Ned's hanging in 1880 at the age of twenty-six.

  One reviewer commented that True History is not so much the story of an individual as the story of a people. Indeed, the story begins even before 1866 with the forcible transportation of Ned's father John Kelly from his home in Tipperary to a prison in Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania), after having been convicted of murdering an Irish landowner for evicting a tenant farmer. Freed from "the Demon" at 30, John Kelly walks across Australia to begin a new life, only to find his circumstances as dire as they ever were. Desperate and starving, son Ned steals his first heiffer at the age of 11. He's forced to quit school to support his family at age twelve, and at fifteen is sold by his mother into an "apprenticeship" with Australian bushranger (highwayman) Harry Power.

  This wasn't my favourite of the 21st century Booker winners, but I admired what author Peter Carey accomplished in bringing Ned Kelly's voice to life, and in rendering a well-travelled piece of local history in a thoughtful and engaging manner.

  From the 2001 Booker shortlist: The Dark Room by Rachel Seiffert ; Atonement by Ian McEwan ; Hotel World by Ali Smith .

  From the 2001 Booker longlist: The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer ; How to Be Good by Nick Hornby ; The Death of Vishnu by Manil Suri ; The Element of Water by Stevie Davies .

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• 2000

  Margaret Atwood - The Blind Assassin - read March 2004.
  This book caught my attention from the very first sentence ("Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a off a bridge.") Through a series of clippings, reminiscences, tales and recollections, the book tells the story of Laura Chase (whose first and only novel becomes a posthumous success with a devoted cult following) and her older sister Iris, The Blind Assassin's narrator. Atwood had been twice shortlisted for the Booker (for The Handmaid's Tale and Cat's Eye), but this was her first win. The Blind Assassin may be Atwood's masterpiece. There's a good review of the book from January magazine here.

  From the 2000 Booker shortlist: When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro ; English Passengers by Matthew Kneale ; The Deposition of Father McGreevy by Brian O'Doherty ; The Keepers of Truth by Michael Collins .

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• 1999

  J M Coetzee - Disgrace - read December 2002.
  David Lurie is a fifty-two year old professor of Communications living in Capetown, South Africa. Following the discovery of his affair with a 20-something year old student (she charges him with sexual harassment, which he denies), Lurie loses his job at the university and goes to visit his daughter, a lesbian farmer on an isolated farm on the Eastern Cape. For a time, Lurie lives peacefully with his daughter, then the novel takes an angry twist. This was an excellent book -- a multilayered story about politics, changing sexual mores and gender expectations in contemporary South Africa. Highly readable.

  From the 1999 Booker shortlist: Fasting, Feasting by Anita Desai ; The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Toibin ; The Map of Love by Ahdaf Soueif ; Headlong by Michael Frayn .

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• 1998

  Ian McEwan - Amsterdam - read November 2002.
  A comical morality tale involving a newspaper editor, a right wing British politician and a modern British composer. The book's title refers to legalization of euthanasia in Amsterdam. A very quick read (a novella, really), which struck me -- and many critics -- as an odd choice for the Booker.

  From the 1998 Booker shortlist: The Industry of Souls by Martin Booth .

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• 1997

  Arundhati Roy - The God of Small Things - read December 2004.
  The God of Small Things is set in the real-life village of Ayemenem, near the town of Kottayam in the state of Kerala, southwest India. The novel tells the story of twins Rahel and Esthappen ("Estha") Kochamma, who are thirty-one as the novel begins (sometime in the 1990s), but children throughout much of the story. The 'bones' of this novel are revealed in its first pages: the twins' half-English cousin Sophie Mol (Mol means young girl in Malayalam) will drown; their untouchable friend Velutha will be killed; a forbidden love affair will occur; the twins will be separated (they are reunited as the novel begins); and their mother -- Ammu -- will die of cancer at thirty-one (she is twenty-seven in 1969, when cousin Sophie and her mother come from England to visit Sophie's father, the twins' uncle Chacko). But it is the relationship of each of these events to the other, and the importance of each occurrence to all that happens next, which forms the real subject matter of God of Small Things.

  Arundhati Roy was the first Indian citizen to win the Booker Prize. (The West Indian-born VS Naipaul and British citizen Salman Rushdie, born in Bombay, have also won the award.)

  From the 1997 Booker shortlist: Europa by Tim Parks ; Grace Notes by Bernard MacLaverty .

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• 1996

  Graham Swift - Last Orders - read March 2005.
  Last Orders follows a group of four men from working-class Bermondsey, South London -- three elderly, and one the adopted son of their deceased friend -- on a driving trip from London to Margate. The men are on a mission to scatter the ashes of their friend Jack Dodds, a butcher who has left "last orders" that his ashes be flung from Margate pier. They are "Lucky" Ray Johnson, an insurance salesman, gambler and friend of Jack's since they met in Egypt in WWII; fruit and vegetable vendor Lenny Tate, also a veteran of the North African campaign; and funeral director Vic Tucker. Driving the car is Vince Dodds, adopted by Jack and his wife Amy in 1945 when Vince's own home and family were flattened by a V-1 buzz-bomb.

  The characters in Last Orders tell the story collaboratively, in alternating chapters, some of which are very brief (particularly memorable is the two word chapter entitled "Vince": "Old buggers."). Some chapters focus on a particular character, while others are named after villages or landmarks along the road. Most of the action takes place in flashback, as each man looks back at incidents from his own life, or in his relationship with the others. Themes of love, loss and impermanence are explored in simple, unpretentious vignettes, and an unexpected plot development near the end of the book gives the story additional moral dimension.

  I loved this book. On one level, it tells the story of a particular generation of English men, and on another it speaks expansively about the periodic sense of loss and groundlessness with which everyone struggles, conveying a clear message about the transient, and thus precious, nature of existence. The most memorable passage in the book comes near the end: "He said, 'Jack boy, it's all down to wastage. ... You got to keep a constant eye on wastage, constant. What you've got to understand is the nature of the goods. Which is perishable."

  From the 1996 Booker shortlist: Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood ; The Orchard on Fire by Shena Mackay ; A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry .

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• 1995

  Pat Barker - The Ghost Road - read July 2004.
  The Ghost Road tells the story of Billy Prior, a working class man who becomes a British Officer during WWI. As the book begins, Prior has been cured of shell shock by his psychiatrist and friend, Dr. William Rivers, and is preparing to return to the front for the last -- and worst -- days of the war. Offered the alternative of a safe position in a munitions factory in London, he chooses battle, apparently out of disgust with those who would choose safety while so many are suffering.

  The characters in Ghost Road are a blend of real-life and fictional. Siegfried Sassoon (1886 - 1967), Dr. William Halse Rivers (1864 - 1922) and Wilfred Owen (1893 - 1918) were real historic figures, while Billy Prior is Barker's own creation. I enjoyed this book, but was very aware of reading the third book in a trilogy without having read the first two (e.g. the references to Sassoon throughout the novel seemed odd, since the details of his story, and the character himself, never make an appearance). It's clear why Barker was awarded the Booker, but of the WWI novels I've read I would place Timothy Findley's The Wars above The Ghost Road.

  From the 1995 Booker shortlist: The Riders by Tim Winton .

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• 1994

  James Kelman - How Late It Was, How Late - read February 2003.
  The protagonist, Sammy, is a thirty-eight year old ex-convict, who as the novel begins wakes up on the street in Glasgow following a weekend-long drinking binge. He picks a fight with some cops and ends up in jail, where he discovers he's gone blind. The rest of the novel is a kind of odyssey, during which Sammy -- unable to see -- tries to make his way back to his girlfriend's apartment, then tries to figure out what's become of her. This is kind of a weird read, not for the judgmental or faint of heart.

From the 1994 Booker shortlist: The Folding Star by Alan Hollinghurst .

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• 1993

  Roddy Doyle - Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha - read March 2007.
  Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha is set in Barrytown, a fictional working class neighbourhood in Dublin's Northside, believed to be a thinly disguised Kilbarrack (where Doyle once worked as a school teacher). The year is around 1966 or 1967 (the novel takes place over approximately two years), and Patrick "Paddy" Clarke, the book's narrator, is about ten years old. He lives with his parents and his younger brother Francis ("Sinbad", so named because his round cheeks remind Paddy and his mates of Sinbad the Sailor), but spends most of his time running with a pack of friends around Barrytown, which seems to be in a state of near constant construction.

  Life is good for Paddy, if punctuated by a steady barrage of low-level violence: corporal punishment at school, the smacks, pinches and "dead legs" he exhanges with his brother, fights between friends and neighbourhood enemies alike and the occasionally ritualized violence of make believe games. He loves his Ma and Da, and routines around the Clarke home seem gentle and familiar. Then slowly, inserted between the tragicomic tales of Paddy and his friends' exploits, we begin to glimpse the possibility that life for Mr. and Mrs. Clarke isn't as congenial as all that. An undercurrent of hostility leads to more open squabbling, then to the occasionally overheard smack. From time to time, Paddy's Da doesn't sleep at home. Then he begins to drink too much.

  Paddy Clarke is a simple story, humorously told, with an ending which is at once ordinary and heartbreaking.

  From the 1993 Booker shortlist: The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields .

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• 1992

  Michael Ondaatje - The English Patient - read October 2004.
  The English Patient begins in April 1945 in the Villa San Girolamo, a nunnery-turned-hospital in Tuscany. There we are introduced to two unnamed characters: "the burned man" (subsequently "the English patient"), and the nurse who has stayed to care for him, though the villa has been nearly destroyed by a mortar shell and everyone else has moved on (the war in Europe has just ended, with the Germans retreating up the Italian countryside). The English patient is struggling to survive life-threatening burns sustained during a plane crash in Egypt's Western Desert. The nurse is battling shell-shock, and grieving the recent death of her father.

  Readers familiar with Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion may be surprised to discover that the nurse is Hana, daughter of Patrick Lewis and Alice Gull, and stepdaughter of radio actress Clara Dickens. Now twenty years old, Hana and the English patient are joined at the villa by David Caravaggio, 45, whom Hana and her father knew in Toronto before the war, and by Kirpal "Kip" Singh, a Sikh serving as a sapper in the British army. The English Patient is told from the points of view of each of these characters, in recollections ranging from the spring of 1945 at the villa, to exploration of the Western Desert by members of the Royal Geographic Society in the early 1930s, to the Gilf Kebir in 1942, to the Westbury white horse in 1940. In a similar vein, the narrative shifts at intervals from the first person to third person, a device which serves -- among other things -- to heighten confusion as to the true identity of the English patient. The result is a fairly disorienting read, and despite my efforts to read attentively, I was often frustrated by my inability to track what was going on. The English Patient is beautifully written, and its exploration of the impact of WWII on a diverse group of individuals makes a significant contribution to literature set in this era, but reading it was hard work.

  Barry Unsworth - Sacred Hunger - read April 2005.
  This was a staggeringly good book. Sacred Hunger begins in 1752 with the construction of the slave ship Liverpool Merchant on the banks of the Mersey River in Liverpool. Owner William Kemp and his twenty-one year old son, Erasmus, are planning the ship's first voyage on the "triangular route" (England-Africa-America and back), hoping to recoup losses suffered in cotton speculation. The ship's crew consists of ship's captain Saul Thurso, first mate James Barton (a past acquaintance of Thurso's), second mate Simmonds, and bosun Haines. Barton and Haines are soon dispatched to capture additional crew members, and so are "hired" Billy Blair, a mentally handicapped man named Daniel Calley, Jim Deakin (sold into the captain's hands by a friend), the fiddler Michael Sullivan and a number of others.

  To Captain Thurso's dismay, the crew are joined by William Kemp's nephew, Matthew Paris, as ship's surgeon. Paris has been recently released from Norwich Jail, where he served time for blasphemy -- "denying Holy Writ" -- after publishing a series of scientific tracts (his pre-Darwinian study of fossils as containing hints on the origin of life is an intriguing part of the story which -- unfortunately -- gets dropped as the novel proceeds). Following the death of his wife and unborn child, Paris has joined the ship's crew voluntarily as a kind of self-erasure, work on a slave ship being "as near to cancelling his former life as he felt he could come".

  The ship leaves Liverpool in 1752, and Captain Thurso purchases nearly 200 slaves in West Africa in 1753. But the Liverpool Merchant never returns to England. We know from the first pages of the book that somehow, a descendant of one of those on board -- an "old plantation slave from Carolina" -- was alive on the streets of New Orleans in 1832. How did he get there, and what happened to him, and to those aboard the ship, in between?

  From the 1992 Booker shortlist: Black Dogs by Ian McEwan .

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• 1991

  Ben Okri - The Famished Road - read May 2004.
  The Famished Road introduces the reader to Azaro, an abiku or "spirit child" dwelling in the in-between world of unborn spirits (the "land of origins", where all spirits reside, both prior to birth and after death). Azaro has been born -- and died young -- a number of times, each time to the same woman. He therefore decides at the beginning of the novel to remain for a time in the "World of the Living", an act of mercy towards his mother.

  This proved to be an exceedingly difficult read (it took me two weeks, during a period in which I've been reading 2 - 3 books a week). Parts of it felt like I was reading them in "real time" ... another pot of peppersoup is prepared and served by Azaro's mother ... another glass of palm-wine is poured by Madame Koto ... another wet night's sleep during the rainy season ... another mosquito coil burns down ... another dusty path is traversed by Azaro's aching father. It was difficult to follow Azaro's stream of consciousness, and to discern from it which events really occurred in the external world, and which were premonitions, nightmares, messages from the spirit world or figments of his imagination. Ultimately, The Famished Road doesn't tell a story, so much as convey an experience or a series of moments in time -- some real, some magical, and some from the world in-between.

  From the 1991 Booker shortlist: Such a Long Journey by Rohinton Mistry .

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• 1990

  A.S. Byatt - Possession - read April 2003.
  Roland Michell is a twenty-nine year old English literary scholar in the 1980s whose career is going nowhere -- he works as a part-time research assistant to the dusty Professor Blackadder, and lives in the basement of a Victorian house in London. Michell discovers a previously unknown connection between Randolph Ash, the Victorian poet he has dedicated his life to studying, and another poet of the same era, Christabel LaMotte (these fictional poets are based loosely on Robert Browning and Christina Rosetti). Through this connection he meets Maud Bailey, a LaMotte scholar and descendant. I loved this book. The glimpse into the world of late 20th century English literary academics was good, prurient fun, the literary allusions were engaging, and the story provides romance, suspense and Bad Guys -- all the necessary ingredients for a terrific page-turner.

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• 1989

  Kazuo Ishiguro - The Remains of the Day - read December 2002.
  Stevens has been the butler at Darlington Hall for over thirty-five years, first during the tenure of Lord Darlington (a British fascist and Nazi sympathizer), then working for his successor, an American by the name of Mr. Farraday. The story is told by Stevens, and unfolds over the course of a week-long car ride to the West Country in the mid-1950s -- Stevens' meditations on the subjects of professional duty, loyalty and democratic responsibility.

  From the 1989 Booker shortlist: Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood .

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• 1988

  Peter Carey - Oscar and Lucinda

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• 1987

  Penelope Lively - Moon Tiger - read March 2003.
  Claudia Hampton, a former war correspondent who spent the better part of her career posted in Egypt (including during WWII), is now an elderly lady dying in hospital. To pass the time, she is writing a history of the world. This was a wonderful book, simultaneously sweet and intelligent, and Claudia earned a place near the top of my mental list of Great Old Ladies in Fiction. Moon Tiger also introduced me to other books by Penelope Lively, including Spiderweb (also a story about a professional woman entering old age), which I enjoyed very much.

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• 1986

  Kingsley Amis - The Old Devils - read September 2006.
  My eighty-two year old grandfather once remarked that "old age is not for wimps", an insight I appreciated less at twenty-eight than I do at forty-two, and which I have every expectation will gain additional resonance over time. Kingsley Amis' characters in The Old Devils make the same point -- that while intellectual and critical capacity may sharpen, and professional, domestic and romantic dramas continue well into our "golden years", the body weakens, and as it does so humiliates and betrays us in a multitude of ways.

  The "Old Devils" are "up-market media Welshman" Alun Weaver, who makes his living as the unabashed apologist for and exploiter of a famous Welsh writer referred to only as Brydan, author of "Tales from the Undergrowth" (transparently based on Welsh poet and writer Dylan Thomas, whom Amis knew from his days at the University of Wales at Swansea). Weaver is joined by the "extremely overweight" Peter Thomas (who once had an affair with Alun's wife, Rhiannon), Malcolm Cellan-Davies (a published poet who also has a history with Rhiannon), "big and fat and red-faced" Charlie Norris, and the faintly pathetic Garth Pumphrey. All have been friends since they competed together at the Dinedor Squash Rackets Club as younger men. Now united by a serious and unrelenting commitment to hard-core boozing, they spend their days at "The Bible", a pub which doubles as the repository of relics from the rackets club, while their wives get blasted on endless bottles of cheap wine at "coffee" parties.

  The Old Devils plods along like a hike in the Welsh countryside (that is, the kind of hike that involves as many stops at a pub for refreshment as it does miles of walking), telling an entertaining, occasionally offensive but overall poignant tale of love, loss, bitterness and reconciliation in the last years of life. I had the feeling it might be more than a little autobiographical, but don't know enough about Amis to really say.

  From the 1986 Booker shortlist: The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood .

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• 1985

  Keri Hulme - The Bone People - read February 2007.
  The Bone People gathered dust on my bookshelf for two years and I was never inspired to tackle it, deterred by something I read in a pamphlet published on the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Booker Prize (Martyn Goff said the novel was "difficult to get into" though he otherwise reviewed it favourably). It is difficult to get into, but only 'til you get past the first seven or eight pages -- a series of random images and small, poetic descriptions that only make sense once you understand what the story is about. Then the characters come to life, the story opens up and I couldn't put this book down.

  Written over a sixteen year period, The Bone People was first published in 1983 by the Spiral Collective (a non-profit feminist press based in Wellington, New Zealand) after having been turned down by several major publishers. It won the 1984 New Zealand Book Award for fiction, the Pegasus Prize for Maori Literature and then -- in 1985 -- the Booker. Bone People tells the story of thirty-something Kerewin "Kere" Holmes (note the similarity to the author's own name), who lives in a six story tower of her own design near a beach on the South Island of New Zealand. Kere, a cigarillo-smoking, guitar-playing, independently wealthy artist and loner, drinks too much, talks to herself and doesn't like people -- children even less. She spends her time fishing, beach combing and playing elaborate word games in her head. But one day a small, blonde child with "seabluegreen eyes" appears at her window wearing a pendant around his neck bearing his name (Simon) and the information that he "cannot speak". Simon, or "Himi" as he is called by his Maori father, changes Kere's life.

  The Bone People tells a tale of despicable violence, and tries to illuminate at how seemingly unforgivable actions can nonetheless -- in certain circumstances -- be redeemed. Perhaps deliberately, it leaves some significant moral questions unanswered in favour of exploring more honestly the texture and dimensions of love, forgiveness and reconciliation within families and communities. This is a highly memorable book, richly deserving of the Booker, by fluke or not.

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• 1984

  Anita Brookner - Hotel du Lac - read November 2002.
  The story of Edith Hope, who writes romance novels under a pseudonym. Following an unhappy incident, Edith's friends send her to the Swiss Hotel du Lac for a rest. There she encounters an unusual cast of characters including Philip Neville, a man determined to release her capacity for mischief and pleasure. This was a quick, light read with lots of heart. I enjoyed it.

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• 1983

  J M Coetzee - Life & Times of Michael K - read June 2005.
  Life & Times of Michael K was published in 1983, eleven years before South Africa's first multi-racial election sounded the final death knell for apartheid. So while the general political context is clear -- this is an apartheid-era story -- the novel is vague, presumably deliberately so, on some key historical details: what year it is, who's in power, and which battles are which (of all possible moments of civil war during those decades). We're told so little about outside circumstances because this is a story about an interior life: the day-to-day experiences of thirty-two year old Michael K, a mentally disabled man with an uncorrected hare lip.

  As the story begins, Michael's mother, Anna, is ailing in her room in Sea Point, a suburb of Cape Town. Hoping to spend her last days in a more hospitable place, Anna asks Michael to take her home to her birthplace, a farm near Prince Albert, in the Karoo. Their progress through the countryside is slower than expected, since Michael must push Anna in a makeshift cart, and they keep getting detained by police and soldiers. The journey does not go well, and Anna dies in hospital in Stellenbosch. Though Michael's journey in the second half of the novel is a long one, the story's real territory and subject matter is his broken heart. And his brave and open heart. From a deserted farm house outside Prince Albert, to the Kenilworth rehabilitation camp and all the way back to Sea Point, Michael dreams of two things: staying outside "the camps", and planting a next generation of seeds in fertile ground.

  From the 1983 Booker shortlist: Waterland by Graham Swift .

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• 1982

  Thomas Keneally - Schindler's Ark

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• 1981

  Salman Rushdie - Midnight's Children - read January 2005.
  Midnight's Children does a spectacular job of illustrating how history becomes more meaningful when viewed through the lens of individual experience. During the course of the novel, described by one reviewer as a "major epic of modern India", protagonist Saleem Sinai and his ancestors witness or participate in nearly every historical event in India between 1915 and 1978: the 1919 massacre at Amritsar, the rise to prominence of the Muslim League in the early 1940s, Indian independence, partition and the creation of Pakistan, Mahatma Gandhi's 1948 assassination, the 1956 Bombay language riots, the Pakistani coup of 1958, the Indo-Pakistan war of 1965, the Chinese invasion, the 1971 war between India and Pakistan over East Pakistan/Bangladesh, and the rise of Indira Gandhi. The timing of these events isn't always accurate (Rushdie has said he was simply interested in exploring the ways "we remake the past to suit our present purposes, using memory as our tool"), and you can never be sure whether a character is entirely fictional, or borrowed -- even in part -- from history. Nonetheless, the novel is a truly engaging portal into the collective experience of 20th century India.

  From the 1981 Booker shortlist: The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas ; The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan .

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• 1980

  William Golding - Rites of Passage - read June 2005.
  Rites of Passage is a historical novel set during the last years of the Napoleonic wars, around 1815. The novel takes place aboard a "superannuated third-rate" British battleship ("third-rate" being both the Royal Navy classification and a description of the ship), and is narrated by Edmund Talbot, an ambitious young gentleman on a voyage of several months' duration from England to Australia. Talbot keeps a journal for the vicarious benefit of his godfather, his benefactor. In it, he records details of day-to-day life on the ship, describing characters including the tyrannical Captain Anderson, the paregoric-pushing servant Wheeler, the "mousey" Pike family, past-her-prime Zenobia Brocklebank ("defending indifferent charms ... by a continual animation which must certainly exhaust her"), and the Reverend Robert James Colley, an affected clergyman whose presence on the ship is surprisingly unwelcome.

  Like Lord of the Flies, Rites of Passage is an exploration of the darker side of human nature. It seems Golding was interested in social dynamics, and in particular in how a group of men would -- or might -- behave in circumstances of isolation, competition and emotional deprivation. Although my memories of Lord of the Flies are more than twenty-five years old, I have faint memories of characters in that book corresponding to some of the characters from Rites (like Piggy, who has much in common with the character of Colley). The homoerotic undercurrent in Rites also brought back memories of the feel (if not the specifics) of Lord of the Flies. What sets Rites apart from Flies is the sense that social degradation, persecution and violence between men is close to the surface of our human natures at all times, not just when we're in extremis.

  Golding planned Rites of Passage as a single novel, but apparently two others grew out of it: Close Quarters (1987) and Fire Down Below (1989). All three were published together in 1991 as To the Ends of the Earth: A Sea Trilogy.

  From the 1980 Booker shortlist: A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr .

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• 1979

  Penelope Fitzgerald - Offshore - read June 2005.
  Set in the fall of 1961, and based in part on the author's own experience living on a barge in the Thames, Offshore tells the story of a group of eccentric adults (and two equally eccentric children) who make their homes aboard antiquated barges moored at London's Battersea Reach.

  While some readers complained that Offshore isn't really about anything, this seems to be typical of Fitzgerald’s work (one critic described her as a "miniaturist", writing novels which are simply small sketches of particular aspects of life). Her 1978 The Bookshop (written a year before Offshore and also nominated for the Booker -- see below) inspired the same kind of response. I found both books quite compelling, each as a different snapshot of life in 20th century England, and think they have the potential to stand the test of time.

  It’s likely that even as she was writing this book in 1979, Fitzgerald was aware that the era she was capturing was fast drawing to a close -- a time when people would be permitted to more or less squat on the shores of the Thames, and antique William de Morgan tiles could still be found embedded in the mud, was a magical time!

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• 1978

  Iris Murdoch - The Sea, the Sea

  From the 1978 shortlist: The Book Shop by Penelope Fitzgerald .

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• 1977

  Paul Scott - Staying On - read April 2004.
  This was a perfect book to pick up soon after reading Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's Heat and Dust (see below). Staying On tells the story of Colonel Tusker Smalley and his wife Lucy, who "stay on" in the hills of Pankot (a fictional hill station based on McCluskieganj and similar places in northern India) after Indian independence erases their colonial status. Tusker dies of a massive coronary in the very first sentence of the book, following which the reader is introduced to the social and cultural surroundings in which the Smalleys have been living for the past forty years.

  Amongst the things I loved about this book: the parallels between the dissolution of the British presence in India and the end of Tucker Smalley's life; the themes of nostalgia and "letting go", and the need to stand by the choices one has made in one's life; the contrasting dynamics in the marriages of the Smalleys and the Bhoolabhoys; and the warmth and connection that surfaces -- from time to time -- in each marriage, despite their outrageous conflicts and eccentricities. There's also a wonderful subtext about coming to grips with professional mediocrity and domestic ordinariness. So much food for thought, I hardly knew where to start.

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• 1976

  David Storey - Saville

  From the 1976 shortlist: An Instant in the Wind by André Brink .

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• 1975

  Ruth Prawer Jhabvala - Heat and Dust - read April 2004.
  What a great book. Heat and Dust tells the story of Olivia Rivers, the bored wife of an English civil servant living in India in the 1920s. The story unfolds in alternating chapters, moving from a third person narrative describing events in Olivia's life in 1923 to first-person story-telling by Olivia's step-granddaughter (the granddaughter of Olivia's husband, Douglas, who remarries later in life). Since the step-granddaughter travels to India herself in the 1970s (where she works on reconstructing -- and retracing -- Olivia's story using a series of letters written by Olivia to her sister), the reader is invited to contrast life in India in the 1920s with conditions in the post-Independence India of the 1970s. A remarkable read, and truly a book I couldn't put down.

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• 1974

  Nadine Gordimer - The Conservationist - read April 2004.
  Mehring is the wealthy director of a South African investment fund. He owns a farm outside Johannesburg, maintained with the assistance of African staff, which functions as equal parts weekend getaway (to which Mehring originally planned to spirit his leftist mistress) and tax deduction. However from the beginning of the novel, the reader understands Mehring's control over his rural surroundings -- his ability to "conserve" what he has there -- to be tenuous, especially when the corpse of an unknown African man is found (then interred, against Mehring's will) on his land. For a review of The Conservationist -- as well as many of Gordimer's other books -- see Per Wastberg's excellent essay at the Nobel Prize site, Nadine Gordimer and the South African Experience.

  Stanley Middleton - Holiday

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• 1973

  J G Farrell - The Siege of Krishnapur

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• 1972

  John Berger - G.

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• 1971

  V S Naipaul - In a Free State

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• 1970

  Bernice Rubens - The Elected Member - read September 2005.
  As Philip Larkin put it in This Be the Verse, "They fuck you up, your mum and dad." The Elected Member is an extended riff on this assertion, chronicling the progression of a mental illness and raising questions about the relationship between family neurosis, social pressure and sublimated sexuality on the one hand, and addiction and clinical "madness" on the other. The novel drags the reader step by step through the claustrophobic, stunting experience of growing up in a family bound by overly rigid rules and expectations, and records the violence sometimes required to break out of such a situation. Its call for greater tolerance and openness within families and compassion for the "mentally ill" is no less pressing 35 years after it was first published, and the underlying questions about the role of the family in the creation of mental illness remain relevant today. The epigraph from Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing's The Politics of Experience provides a clue as to Rubens' own take on the matter, but she also allowed -- as she created forty-one year old Norman Zweck -- for some additional (if equally common) complications: grief, addiction and homophobia (both internal and external).

  The Elected Member is a great book, wise, humane, readable and "real". It's also one of those novels that to really appreciate, you have to stop every now and again and pretend you're reading it in 1969 (when it was written), instead of 2005. Rubens was alive to the complications of the family long before many people were addressing these issues.

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• 1969

  P H Newby - Something to Answer For

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