Award
Booker Prize
The Booker Prize is awarded annually for the best novel written in English and published in the UK or Ireland.
2025
Flesh
Teenaged István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. Shy and new in town, he is a stranger to the social rituals practiced by his classmates and is soon isolated, drawn instead into a series of events that leave him forever a stranger to peers, his mother, and himself.
In...
2024
Orbital
Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts—from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan—have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below.
We...
2023
Prophet Song
On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police on her step. They have arrived to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist. Ireland is falling apart, caught in the grip of a government...
2022
Chats With the Dead
Colombo, 1990. Maali Almeida—war photographer, gambler, and closet queen—has woken up dead in what seems like a celestial visa office. His dismembered body is sinking in the serene Beira Lake, and he has no idea who killed him.
In a country where scores are settled by death squads, suicide...
2021
The Promise
Haunted by an unmet promise, the Swart family loses touch after the death of their matriarch. Adrift, the lives of the three siblings move separately through the uncharted waters of South Africa; Anton, the golden boy who bitterly resents his life’s unfulfilled potential; Astrid, whose beauty is her...
2020
Shuggie Bain
Shuggie Bain is the unforgettable story of young Hugh “Shuggie” Bain, a sweet and lonely boy who spends his 1980s childhood in run-down public housing in Glasgow, Scotland. Thatcher’s policies have put husbands and sons out of work, and the city’s notorious drugs epidemic is waiting in the...
2019
The Testaments
More than fifteen years after the events of The Handmaid's Tale, the theocratic regime of the Republic of Gilead maintains its grip on power, but there are signs it is beginning to rot from within.
At this crucial moment, the lives of three radically different women converge, with potentially...
Girl, Woman, Other
Spanning generations and perspectives, Girl, Woman, Other follows the interconnected lives of twelve characters—mostly Black British women—whose stories unfold across contemporary Britain and beyond. From a celebrated playwright preparing for a major premiere to a nonbinary social media influencer...
2018
Milkman
In an unnamed city, middle sister stands out for the wrong reasons. She reads while walking, for one. And she has been taking French night classes downtown.
So when a local paramilitary named Milkman begins pursuing her, she suddenly becomes “interesting,” the last thing she ever wanted to be....
2017
Lincoln in the Bardo
February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days,...
2016
The Sellout
Born in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens—on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles—the narrator of *The Sellout* resigns himself to the fate of lower-middle-class Californians: "I'd die in the same bedroom I'd grown up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling that've been there since the...
2015
A Brief History of Seven Killings
On December 3, 1976, just before the Jamaican general election and two days before Bob Marley was to play the Smile Jamaica Concert to ease political tensions in Kingston, seven gunmen stormed the singer’s house, machine guns blazing. The attack wounded Marley, his wife, and his manager, and injured...
2014
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
August, 1943: Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his affair with his uncle’s young wife two years earlier. His life, in a brutal Japanese POW camp on the Thai-Burma Death Railway, is a daily struggle to save the men under his command. Until he receives a letter that will change him...
2013
The Luminaries
It is 1866, and Walter Moody has come to stake his claim in New Zealand's booming gold rush. On the stormy night of his arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of 12 local men who have met in secret to discuss a series of unexplained events: a wealthy man has vanished, a prostitute has tried...
2012
Bring Up the Bodies
Thomas Cromwell, Book 2
Though he battled for seven years to marry her, Henry is disenchanted with Anne Boleyn. She has failed to give him a son and her sharp intelligence and audacious will alienate his old friends and the noble families of England. When the discarded Katherine dies in exile from the court, Anne stands...
2011
The Sense of an Ending
This intense new novel follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance, one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present.
Tony Webster thought he’d left all this behind as he built a life for...
2010
The Finkler Question
At once witty and deeply searching, The Finkler Question follows Julian Treslove, a lonely and uncertain man who finds himself drawn into the lives of two old friends: Sam Finkler, a celebrated philosopher and public intellectual, and Libor Sevcik, a retired teacher haunted by love and loss. After a...
2009
Wolf Hall
Thomas Cromwell, Book 1
In the ruthless arena of King Henry VIII's court, only one man dares to gamble his life to win the king's favor and ascend to the heights of political power.
England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry...
2008
The White Tiger
No saris. No scents. No spices. No music. No lyricism. No illusions.
This is India now.
Balram Halwai is a complicated man. Servant. Philosopher. Entrepreneur. Murderer. Over the course of seven nights, by the scattered light of a preposterous chandelier, Balram tells us the terrible and...
2007
The Gathering
Anne Enright is a dazzling writer of international stature and one of Ireland’s most singular voices. Now she delivers *The Gathering*, a moving, evocative portrait of a large Irish family and a shot of fresh blood into the Irish literary tradition, combining the lyricism of the old with the shock...
2006
The Inheritance of Loss
In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas lives an embittered judge who wants only to retire in peace, when his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, arrives on his doorstep. The judge’s cook watches over her distractedly, for his thoughts are often on his son, Biju,...
2005
The Sea
In this luminous novel, John Banville introduces us to Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child to cope with the recent loss of his wife. It is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled family...
2004
The Line of Beauty
Set in 1980s London at the height of Thatcherism, The Line of Beauty follows Nick Guest, a young Oxford graduate who becomes entangled in the privileged world of the wealthy and well-connected. Invited to stay in the grand Notting Hill home of the Feddens—headed by a rising Conservative MP—Nick...
2003
Vernon God Little
When sixteen kids are shot on high school grounds, everyone looks for someone to blame. Meet Vernon Little, under arrest at the sheriff's office, a teenager wearing nothing but yesterday's underwear and his prized logo sneakers. Moments after the shooter, his best buddy, turns the gun on himself,...
2002
Life of Pi
After the sinking of a cargo ship, a solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild blue Pacific. The only survivors from the wreck are a sixteen-year-old boy named Pi, a hyena, a wounded zebra, an orangutan—and a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger.
Soon the tiger has dispatched all but Pi Patel, whose...
2001
True History of the Kelly Gang
In *True History of the Kelly Gang*, the legendary Ned Kelly speaks for himself, scribbling his narrative on errant scraps of paper in semiliterate but magically descriptive prose as he flees from the police. To his pursuers, Kelly is nothing but a monstrous criminal, a thief and a murderer.
To...
2000
The Blind Assassin
The bestselling author of *The Handmaid's Tale* and *The Testaments* weaves together strands of gothic suspense, romance, and science fiction into one utterly spellbinding narrative, beginning with the mysterious death of a young woman named Laura Chase in 1945.
Decades later, Laura’s sister Iris...
1999
Disgrace
At fifty-two, Professor David Lurie is divorced, filled with desire, but lacking in passion. When an affair with a student leaves him jobless, shunned by friends, and ridiculed by his ex-wife, he retreats to his daughter Lucy's smallholding.
David's visit becomes an extended stay as he attempts to...
1998
Amsterdam
On a chilly February day, two old friends meet in the throng outside a London crematorium to pay their last respects to Molly Lane. Both Clive Linley and Vernon Halliday had been Molly's lovers in the days before they reached their current eminence: Clive is Britain's most successful modern...
1997
The God of Small Things
Set in the lush, humid landscape of Kerala, India, The God of Small Things tells the story of fraternal twins Estha and Rahel, whose lives are forever shaped by a single, devastating event. Moving between past and present, the novel unfolds in fragments—memories, sensations, and silences—gradually...
1996
Last Orders
Four men gather in a London pub. They have taken it upon themselves to carry out the last orders of Jack Dodds, master butcher, and deliver his ashes to the sea. As they drive towards the fulfillment of their mission, their errand becomes an extraordinary journey into their collective and individual...
1995
The Ghost Road
Regeneration, Book 3
The Ghost Road is the culminating masterpiece of Pat Barker's towering World War I fiction trilogy. The time of the novel is the closing months of the most senselessly savage of modern conflicts. In France, millions of men engaged in brutal trench warfare are all "ghosts in the making."
In...
1994
How Late It Was, How Late
One Sunday morning in Glasgow, shoplifting ex-con Sammy awakens in an alley, wearing another man's shoes and trying to remember his two-day drinking binge. He gets in a scrap with some soldiers and revives in a jail cell, badly beaten and, he slowly discovers, completely blind.
And things get...
1993
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
It is 1968. Patrick Clarke is ten. He loves Geronimo, the Three Stooges, and the smell of his hot water bottle. He can't stand his little brother Sinbad. His best friend is Kevin, and their names are all over Barrytown, written with sticks in wet cement. They play football, lepers, and jumping to...
1992
The English Patient
The nurse Hana, exhausted by death, obsessively tends to her last surviving patient. Caravaggio, the thief, tries to reimagine who he is, now that his hands are hopelessly maimed. The Indian sapper Kip searches for hidden bombs in a landscape where nothing is safe but himself. And at the center of...
Sacred Hunger
Sacred Hunger is a stunning and engrossing exploration of power, domination, and greed. Filled with the "sacred hunger" to expand its empire and its profits, England entered full into the slave trade and spread the trade throughout its colonies.
In this Booker Prize-winning work, Barry Unsworth...
1991
The Famished Road
The Famished Road Trilogy, Book 1
The narrator, Azaro, is an abiku, a spirit child, who in the Yoruba tradition of Nigeria exists between life and death. The life he foresees for himself and the tale he tells is full of sadness and tragedy, but inexplicably he is born with a smile on his face. Nearly called back to the land of the...
1990
Possession
Possession traces the lives of a pair of young academics as they uncover a clandestine relationship between two long-dead Victorian poets.
As they unearth their letters, journals, and poems, and track their movements from London to Yorkshire—from spiritualist séances to the fairy-haunted far west...
1989
The Remains of the Day
This is Kazuo Ishiguro's profoundly compelling portrait of a butler named Stevens. Stevens, at the end of three decades of service at Darlington Hall, spending a day on a country drive, embarks as well on a journey through the past in an effort to reassure himself that he has served humanity by...
1988
Oscar and Lucinda
This sweeping, irrepressibly inventive novel is a romance, but a romance of the sort that could only take place in nineteenth-century Australia.
For only on that sprawling continent—a haven for misfits of both the animal and human kingdoms—could a nervous Anglican minister who gambles on the...
1987
Moon Tiger
Elderly, uncompromising Claudia Hampton lies in a London hospital bed with memories of life fluttering through her fading consciousness. An author of popular history, Claudia proclaims she’s carrying out her last project: a history of the world. This history turns out to be a mosaic of her own life...
1986
The Old Devils
Age has done everything except mellow the characters in Kingsley Amis’s *The Old Devils*, which turns its humane and ironic gaze on a group of Welsh married couples who have been spending their golden years—when “all of a sudden the evening starts starting after breakfast”—nattering, complaining,...
1985
The Bone People
In a tower on the New Zealand sea lives Kerewin Holmes: part Maori, part European, asexual and aromantic, an artist estranged from her art, a woman in exile from her family.
One night her solitude is disrupted by a visitor—a speechless, mercurial boy named Simon, who tries to steal from her and...
1984
Hotel Du Lac
When middle-aged romance writer Edith Hope’s life begins to resemble the melodramatic plots of her own novels, her friends banish her to Switzerland, where they hope the luxurious calm of the Hotel du Lac will restore her to her senses. But instead of contritely contemplating her mistakes, Edith...
1983
Life and Times of Michael K
In a South Africa turned by war, Michael K. sets out to take his ailing mother back to her rural home. On the way there she dies, leaving him alone in an anarchic world of brutal roving armies.
Imprisoned, Michael is unable to bear confinement and escapes, determined to live with dignity.
This...
1982
Schindler's List
Based on a true story, Schindler's List follows Oskar Schindler, an unlikely hero whose transformation unfolds against the backdrop of Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II. A businessman and opportunist at the outset, Schindler arrives in Kraków seeking profit, exploiting the cheap labor of...
1981
Midnight's Children
Saleem Sinai, the hero of *Midnight's Children*, is one of the thousand and one children born in India at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the dawn of its independence from British rule—the moment, in the words of its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, when India had her "'tryst with...
1980
Rites of Passage
To the Ends of the Earth, Book 1
Sailing to Australia in the early years of the nineteenth century, Edmund Talbot keeps a journal to amuse his godfather back in England. Full of wit and disdain, he records the mounting tensions on the ancient, sinking warship where officers, sailors, soldiers, and emigrants jostle in the cramped...
1979
Offshore
On the Battersea Reach of the Thames, a mixed bag of eccentrics live in houseboats. Belonging to neither land nor sea, they belong to one another.
There is Maurice, a homosexual prostitute; Richard, a buttoned-up ex-navy man; but most of all there's Nenna, the struggling mother of two wild little...
1978
The Sea, the Sea
Charles Arrowby, leading light of England's theatrical set, retires from glittering London to an isolated home by the sea. He plans to write a memoir about his great love affair with Clement Makin, his mentor, both professionally and personally, and amuse himself with Lizzie, an actress he has...
1977
Staying On
Set in post-independence India, Staying On revisits the world of the Raj through the lives of Tusker and Lucy Smalley, an aging British couple who have chosen to remain in the country after the end of empire. Living modestly in a declining hill station hotel, they navigate a quieter, more uncertain...
1976
Saville
Spanning the early decades of the twentieth century, Saville traces the life of Colin Saville, the son of a Yorkshire miner, as he grows from childhood into adulthood amid the shifting social landscape of industrial England. Rooted in a close-knit working-class community, Colin’s early years are...
1975
Heat and Dust
Partly set in colonial India during the 1920s, *Heat and Dust* tells the story of Olivia, a beautiful woman suffocated by the propriety and social constraints of her position as the wife of an important English civil servant.
Longing for passion and independence, Olivia is drawn into the spell of...
1974
The Conservationist
Mehring is rich. He has all the privileges and possessions that South Africa has to offer, but his possessions refuse to remain objects.
His wife, son, and mistress leave him; his foreman and workers become increasingly indifferent to his stewardship; even the land rises up, as drought, then flood,...
Holiday
Set in a quiet English seaside town, Holiday follows Edwin Fisher, a middle-aged academic who retreats alone for a short vacation, seeking distance from the routines and responsibilities of his everyday life. What begins as a simple escape soon becomes something more introspective, as Edwin reflects...
1973
The Siege of Krishnapur
Empire, Book 2
India, 1857—the year of the Great Mutiny, when Muslim soldiers turned in bloody rebellion on their British overlords. This time of convulsion is the subject of J. G. Farrell’s *The Siege of Krishnapur*, widely considered one of the finest British novels of the last fifty years.
Farrell’s story is...
1972
G.
In this luminous novel — winner of Britain's prestigious Booker Prize — John Berger relates the story of "G.," a young man forging an energetic sexual career in Europe during the early years of this century.
With profound compassion, Berger explores the hearts and minds of both men and women, and...
1971
In a Free State
In the beginning it is just a car trip through Africa. Two English people—Bobby, a civil servant with a guilty appetite for African boys, and Linda, a supercilious “compound wife”—are driving back to their enclave after a stay in the capital. But in between lies the landscape of an unnamed country...
1970
The Elected Member
Norman is the clever one of a close-knit Jewish family in the East End of London. Infant prodigy; brilliant barrister; the apple of his parents' eyes... until at forty-one he becomes a drug addict, confined to his bedroom, at the mercy of his hallucinations and paranoia.
For Norman, his committal...
1969
Something to Answer For
It is 1956 and Townrow is in Port Said – of these two facts he’s reasonably certain. He has been summoned by the widow of his deceased friend, Elie Khoury. She is convinced that Elie was murdered, but nobody seems to agree with her.
What about Leah Strauss, the mistress? And the invading British...