Which Booker Prize-winning novel should you read

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Quiz Questions

1.
Do you judge a book by its cover?
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- A.
  Always
- B.
  Never
2.
Long books or short books: what are you looking for in terms of length?
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- A.
  Something short and sweet
- B.
  Huge, heavy and utterly immersive
- C.
  How about a happy medium?
3.
Do you prefer a contemporary read, or something tried and tested?
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- A.
  I prefer something new and buzzworthy
- B.
  I like a classic that's stood the test of time
4.
The most interesting stories are told...
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- A.
  By an unreliable narrator
- B.
  By an expert witness
- C.
  By impartial observers
5.
Which genre do you often gravitate towards?
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- A.
  Something with a bit of romance
- B.
  Give me historical fiction any day
- C.
  Something suspenseful
- D.
  I love a family drama
- E.
  I enjoy something laced with humour
- F.
  I like a touch of fantasy
- G.
  Something otherworldly
- H.
  A classic tragedy
6.
What do you look for in a work of fiction? 
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- A.
  Something with a bit of topicality
- B.
  A book to help me escape
- C.
  Sharp observations about the past
7.
Do you want this book to…
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- A.
  Make you laugh
- B.
  Make you cry
- C.
  Teach you something new
- D.
  Blow your mind
- E.
  Make your heart soar
- F.
  Make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up
8.
Your ideal central character is…
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- A.
  A flawed anti-hero
- B.
  A strong, resilient protagonist
- C.
  An outsider or misfit
- D.
  Someone morally complex
- E.
  Someone ordinary caught up in extraordinary circumstances
9.
Are you the sort of person who tends to…
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- A.
  Dwell on the past
- B.
  Lives in the present
- C.
  Looks to the future
10.
Which writing style do you gravitate towards?
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- A.
  Straightforward and concise
- B.
  Richly descriptive and poetic
- C.
  Something altogether unique and experimental
- D.
  Introspective and philosophical
11.
Do you enjoy a happy ending?
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- A.
  I adore them. Give me all the feel-good vibes
- B.
  Only if they’re earned, and not too perfect
- C.
  No thanks, I like darker and more realistic conclusions
12.
Do you prefer books based on fact, or a complete work of fiction?
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- A.
  I enjoy a story based on real events
- B.
  I prefer something that’s purely fictional
13.
Where would you prefer the setting of your next book to take place?
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- A.
  In a sunny, tropical climate
- B.
  A bustling urban sprawl
- C.
  In the quiet, remote countryside
- D.
  A mix of diverse locations
- E.
  A futuristic, dystopian world
- F.
  Beyond the realms of Earth
14.
Which topic draws you most to a new read?
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- A.
  Something brimming with love and passion
- B.
  A book which tackles death, head on
- C.
  A plot packed with greed and ambition
- D.
  A page-turner driven by revenge and justice
- E.
  A complex narrative filled with emotional depth and complexity
15.
Are you drawn to books that are widely celebrated or off the beaten path
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- A.
  I like a hidden gem
- B.
  I usually opt for a bestseller

Quiz Outcomes

1.
You should read Something to Answer For by P. H. Newby
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The winner of the Booker Prize 1969. P.H. Newby’s 17th novel made literary history, when it was named as the inaugural winner. It was 1956 and he was in Port Said. About these two facts he was reasonably certain but a murderous attack left him certain about little else - maybe just the conviction that the British usually did the right thing and that to be a crook a man must assume the society he lived in was honest.
2.
You should read The Elected Member by Bernice Rubens
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The winner of the Booker Prize 1970. Norman was always ‘the clever one’. But in his early 40s, the infant prodigy turned brilliant barrister becomes a drug addict, confined to his bedroom at the mercy of his hallucinations. For Norman, his committal to a mental hospital represents the ultimate betrayal. For Rabbi Zweck, his son’s deterioration is a bitter reminder of his own guilt and failure. Only Bella, the unmarried sister, can bridge the abyss of pain to bring father and son the peace they both so desperately crave.Bernice Rubens explores what happens to a respectable, close-knit Jewish family when the apple of his parents’ eyes becomes a middle-aged drug addict.
3.
You should read In a Free State by V. S. Naipaul
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The winner of the Booker Prize 1971. In stories wrapped around a novella (later published as a separate volume), Naipaul introduces a range of discomfiting characters - a mercilessly bullied tramp, a compromised servant, a humiliated cousin and a disaffected tourist. In the central narrative he imagines a new Heart of Darkness for Africa, as a British civil servant and his wife drive back to their compound across an unnamed country: a dangerous journey into an increasingly disturbed and violent land.Through five connected tales, V.S. Naipaul explores alienation, disruption and racial tension in a perilously unpredictable world.
4.
You should read G. by John Berger
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The winner of the Booker Prize 1972. With profound compassion, John Berger explores the hearts and minds of both men and women, and what happens during sex, to reveal the conditions of the Don Juan’s success: his essential loneliness, the quiet culmination in each of his sexual experiences of all of those that precede it, the tenderness that infuses even the briefest of his encounters, and the way women experience their own extraordinariness through their moments with him.
5.
You should read The Siege of Krishnapur by J. G. Farrell
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The winner of the Booker Prize 1973. India, 1857 – the year of the Great Mutiny. In an isolated Victorian outpost on the subcontinent, rumours of strife begin to filter in from afar. Yet the members of the colonial community remain confident of their military and, above all, moral superiority. When they find themselves under actual siege, however, the true character of their dominion – at once brutal, blundering and wistful – is soon revealed.J.G. Farrell details the siege of a fictional town in India in 1857, when Muslim soldiers turned to bloody rebellion against their British overlords.
6.
You should read The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer
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The winner of the Booker Prize 1974. Mehring is rich, with 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, destroy his farm. The upheaval in his world increasingly resembles that in the country as a whole, and it becomes clear that only a seismic shift in ideas and concrete action can avert annihilation.Nadine Gordimer paints a complex portrait of dangerously deluded and wilfully ignorant privilege, set in South Africa during the time of Apartheid.
7.
You should read Holiday by Stanley Middleton
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The winner of the Booker Prize 1974. Edwin Fisher is at the seaside, but this is no normal beach holiday. To escape the death of his son and the death-throes of his marriage, he has retreated to a place where he had once known the unqualified happiness of childhood. But as painful memories rise unbidden and uncontrolled, Edwin must confront each in turn – realising that without a past there can be no future.Stanley Middleton’s novel is both a precisely observed portrait of English provincial life and a moving exploration of grief and regret.
8.
You should read Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
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The winner of the Booker Prize 1975. In 1920s India, Olivia – a beautiful, spoiled and deeply bored English colonial wife – is drawn inexorably to a minor Indian prince. Eventually she outrages the tiny, suffocating town where her husband is a civil servant when she elopes with the captivating Nawab. This is also the story of Olivia’s step-granddaughter who, 50 years later, is drawn to India by her fascination with the letters left behind by the now dead woman, and by her obsession with solving the enigma of Olivia’s scandal.Ruth Prawer Jhabvala skilfully weaves two parallel stories set in India, one in the present and the other in the days of British rule.
9.
You should read Saville by David Storey
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The winner of the Booker Prize 1976. Saville is set in South Yorkshire in the fictional mining village of Saxton. This is the story of Colin Saville’s struggle to come to terms with his family – his mercurial, ambitious father, his deep-feeling, long-suffering mother – and to escape the stifling heritage of the raw mining community into which he was born.Set in and around the Second World War, this is David Storey’s tale about a boy from a mining town who grows away from his roots.
10.
You should read Staying On by Paul Scott
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The winner of the Booker Prize 1977. Colonel Tusker and Lucy Smalley stay on in the hills of Pankot after Indian independence deprives them of their colonial status. Finally fed up with accommodating her husband, Lucy claims a degree of independence herself. Eloquent and hilarious, she and Tusker act out class tensions among the British of the Raj and give voice to the loneliness, rage and stubborn affection in their marriage.Paul Scott’s sequel to The Raj Quartet is both an engrossing portrait of the end of an empire and an engaging dissection of a long-lasting marriage.
11.
You should read The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch
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The winner of the Booker Prize 1978.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, and to amuse himself with Lizzie, an actress he has strung along for many years. But his plans fail, and his memoir evolves into a riveting chronicle of strange events and unexpected visitors - some real, some spectral - that disrupt his world and shake his oversized ego to its very core.Iris Murdoch turns her microscopic gaze on vanity and obsession, in her 19th novel.
12.
You should read Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald
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The winner of the Booker Prize 1979.A houseboat community rises and falls with the tide of the Thames on Battersea Reach. Living between land and water, its members feel as if they belong to neither. Maurice, a male prostitute, is the sympathetic friend to whom the others turn. Nenna loves her husband but can’t get him back; her children run wild on the muddy foreshore. She feels drawn to ex-naval reserve Richard, whose converted minesweeper dominates the Reach. But is he sexually attractive simply because he can fold maps the right way?Penelope Fitzgerald offers a delightful glimpse into the workings of the eccentric London community living on houseboats on Battersea Reach.
13.
You should read Rites of Passage by William Golding
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The winner of the Booker Prize 1980. In the early 1800s, Edmund Talbot, a young and rather priggish Englishman, takes passage on a boat heading for Australia where he is to be an official in the colonial government. In addition to Talbot, many of the eccentric passengers - a sexually predatory sailor, an aging coquette, the ship’s tyrannical captain - undergo profound changes in the course of the voyage, during which a naive clergyman is victimised and, finally, pushed to take drastic action.The first book of William Golding’s Sea Trilogy is a haunting account of an epic sea journey, which profoundly affects all those who set sail on it.
14.
You should read Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
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The winner of the Booker Prize 1981. Born at midnight on August 15, 1947, at the precise moment of India’s independence, the infant Saleem Sinai is celebrated in the press and welcomed by Prime Minister Nehru himself. But this coincidence of birth has consequences for which Saleem is not prepared: telepathic powers that connect him with 1,000 other ‘midnight’s children’ - all born in the initial hour of India’s independence - and an uncanny sense of smell that allows him to sniff out danger imperceptible to others. Saleem’s life is a whirlwind of disasters and triumphs that mirror the course of modern India at its most impossible, in Salman Rushdie’s masterpiece.
15.
You should read Schindler’s Ark by Thomas Keneally
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The winner of the Booker Prize 1982. In the shadow of Auschwitz, a flamboyant German industrialist continually defies the SS and becomes a living legend to the Jews of Krakow. This is the story of Oskar Schindler, a womaniser and drinker who was transformed by the war into a man with a mission, risking his life to protect beleaguered Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland. The book was published as Schindler’s List in the US and subsequently turned into a hugely successful film, which won seven Oscars, including Best Picture.Thomas Keneally’s remarkable work of historical fiction about the unlikely hero who rescued thousands of Jews from the Nazi death machine.
16.
You should read Life and Times of Michael K by J. M. Coetzee
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The winner of the Booker Prize 1983. In a South Africa torn by civil 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 life-affirming novel illuminates the human experience: the need for an interior, spiritual life; for meaningful connections to the world in which we live; and for purity of vision.J.M. Coetzee sets his main character on an arduous physical journey, which becomes a quest for inner freedom.
17.
You should read Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner
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The winner of the Booker Prize 1984.Edith Hope writes romance novels under a pseudonym. When her life begins to resemble the plots of her own novels, however, Edith flees to Switzerland, where the quiet luxury of the Hotel du Lac promises to restore her to her senses. But instead of peace and rest, Edith finds herself sequestered at the hotel with an assortment of love’s casualties and exiles. She also attracts the attention of a worldly man determined to release her unused capacity for mischief and pleasure.
18.
You should read The Bone People by Keri Hulme
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The winner of the Booker Prize 1985. One New Zealand night, artist in exile Kerewin’s solitude is disrupted by a visitor – a speechless, mercurial boy named Simon, who tries to steal from her and then repays her with his most precious possession. As Kerewin succumbs to Simon’s feral charms, she also falls under the spell of his Maori foster father Joe, who rescued the boy from a shipwreck and now treats him with an unsettling mixture of tenderness and brutality.Keri Hulme’s novel focuses on the mysterious relationships between three unorthodox outsiders of mixed Maori and European heritage.
19.
You should read The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis
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The winner of the Booker Prize 1986. Do people ever really grow up? These old devils are just as they have always been, but trapped in a slowly aging body. It’s like living in a house that needs repair, but the repairman never comes. When Alun Weaver and his wife, Rhiannon, a famous beauty in her day, move into a quiet retirement community, they find it peopled by friends from former days. Suddenly all the ambitions and energies, overgrown with years like weeds, burst out afresh.
20.
You should read Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively
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The winner of the Booker Prize 1987. Claudia Hampton, a famous writer, lies dying in hospital. But as the nurses tend to her with quiet condescension, she is plotting her greatest work: ‘a history of the world… and in the process, my own’. Gradually she re-creates the rich mosaic of her life and times, conjuring up those she has known. There is Gordon, her adored brother; Jasper, the charming, untrustworthy lover and father of Lisa, her cool, conventional daughter; and Tom, her one great love, both found and lost in wartime Egypt.Penelope Lively’s timeless novel explores the shifting nature of reality and identity through the many lives of its narrator.
21.
You should read Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
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The winner of the Booker Prize 1988Oscar is a young English clergyman who has broken with his past and developed a disturbing talent for gambling. A country girl of singular ambition, Lucinda moves to Sydney, driven by dreams of self-reliance and the building of an industrial Utopia. Together this unlikely pair create and are created by the spectacle of mid-19th-century Australia. Peter Carey’s rich and endlessly inventive tale about two unusual characters in 19th-century Australia.
22.
You should read The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
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The winner of the Booker Prize 1989. At the end of his three decades of service at Darlington Hall, Stevens embarks on a country drive, during which he looks back over his career to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving ‘a great gentleman.’ But lurking in his memory are doubts about the true nature of Lord Darlington’s ‘greatness’ – and graver doubts about his own faith in the man he has served.Kazuo Ishiguro’s moving portrait of the perfect English butler, his loyalty and his fading, insular world in post-war England.
23.
You should read Possession by A. S. Byatt
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The winner of the Booker Prize 1990. Maud Bailey is a scholar researching the life and work of her distant relative, a little-known 19th-century poet named Christabel LaMotte. Roland Mitchell is looking into an obscure moment in the life of another Victorian poet, the celebrated Randolph Henry Ash. Together, the two uncover a dark secret in Ash’s life: though apparently happily married, he conducted a torrid affair with LaMotte. As Maud and Roland dig deeper, they too find themselves falling in love.Two modern-day academics uncover a secret affair between famous fictional poets in A.S. Byatt’s gloriously exhilarating novel of wit and romance.
24.
You should read The Famished Road by Ben Okri
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The winner of the Booker Prize 1991. 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 are full of sadness and tragedy, but inexplicably he is born with a smile on his face. Nearly called back to the realm of the dead, he is resurrected to confront the tension between the land of the living, often joyful despite violence and political struggles, and the temptations of the carefree kingdom of the spirits.Ben Okri’s unique epic, narrated by ‘an unwilling adventurer into chaos and sunlight, into the dreams of the living and the dead’.
25.
You should read The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
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The winner of the Booker Prize 1992.Four very disparate war-torn people, a young woman and three men, take refuge in a damaged villa north of Florence as the war retreats around them. In an upstairs room lies the badly burned English patient, alive but unable to move. His extraordinary adventures and turbulent love affair in the North African desert before the war provide the focus around which the vivid tales of his companions revolve. His very presence will forever change the destiny of those around him.
26.
You should read Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth
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The winner of the Booker Prize 1992. Outcast Matthew Paris boards the Liverpool Merchant as ship’s doctor on a slave trade voyage. Illness breaks out, and slaves are ordered to be tossed overboard. Mutiny ensues and, with Paris as one of the leaders, the ship sails for Florida to establish an egalitarian society. Meanwhile, the loss of the ship has ruined its owner, Kemp, who hangs himself. Twelve years later, upon hearing rumours of a utopian interracial community in Florida, Kemp’s son sets out for revenge.
27.
You should read Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle
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The winner of the Booker Prize 1993. 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 the bottom of the sea. But why didn’t anyone help him when Charles Leavy had been trying to kill him? Paddy sees everything, but he understands less and less.Roddy Doyle’s funny and poignant novel about a young boy trying to make sense of the world.
28.
You should read How late it was, how late by James Kelman
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The winner of the Booker Prize 1994. One Sunday morning in Glasgow, Sammy awakens in a lane and tries to remember the two-day drinking binge that landed him there. Things only get worse. Sammy gets into a fight with some soldiers, lands in jail, and discovers that he is completely blind. His girlfriend disappears, the police probe him endlessly, and his stab at Disability Compensation embroils him in the Kafkaesque red tape of the welfare system.James Kelman’s raw, wry vision of human survival in a bureaucratic world is given voice by Sammy, an ex-convict with a penchant for shoplifting.
29.
You should read The Ghost Road by Pat Barker
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The winner of the Booker Prize 1995. In 1918, Billy Prior experiences a late-summer idyll, some days of perfect beauty, before the final battles in a war that has destroyed most of his generation. In London, Prior’s psychologist, William Rivers, tends to his new patients, more young men whose lives and minds have been shattered. And remembers the primitive society on Eddystone Island where he studied as an anthropologist before the war.The third volume of Pat Barker’s trilogy, which follows the fortunes of shell-shocked British army officers towards the end of the First World War.
30.
You should read Last Orders by Graham Swift
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The winner of the Booker Prize 1996. 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 into the sea. For reasons she does not disclose, Jack’s widow, Amy, declines to join them. As the men drive towards the fulfilment of their mission, their errand becomes an extraordinary journey into their collective and individual pasts.Sorrow and resentment mingle with passion and regret in Graham Swift’s testament to a changing England and to enduring mortality.
31.
You should read The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
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The winner of the Booker Prize 1997. Set in Kerala in the 1960s, the novel paints a vivid picture of life in a rural Indian town, the thoughts and feelings of the two small children, and the complexity and hypocrisy of the adults in their world. It is also a poignant lesson in the destructive power of the caste system and moral and political bigotry in general.Arundhati Roy’s poetic debut novel tells the story of twins Estha and Rahel, and the shocking consequences of a pivotal event in their young lives.
32.
You should read Amsterdam by Ian McEwan
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The winner of the Booker Prize 1998. Gorgeous, feisty Molly Lane had many lovers, among them Clive Linley, Britain’s most famous composer, Vernon Halliday, editor of a respected broadsheet, and Julian Garmony, Foreign Secretary – and tipped to be the next prime minister. When Clive and Vernon meet to pay their last respects to Molly at her funeral, they make a pact that will have unforeseen and profound consequences for everyone concerned.A fragile friendship descends into hatred and revenge, in Ian McEwan’s darkly humorous novel.
33.
You should read Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee
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The winner of the Booker Prize 1999. Refusing to apologise after an impulsive affair with a student, David Lurie, a 52-year-old professor in Cape Town, seeks refuge on his daughter’s farm. Here, a savage and disturbing attack brings into relief the faults in their relationship. Pitching the moral code of political correctness against the values of Romantic poetry, Disgrace examines dichotomies both in personal relationships and in the unaccountability of one culture towards another.J.M. Coetzee became the first author to win twice, following up his 1983 victory with Disgrace, an uncomfortable story of post-apartheid South Africa and sexual politics.
34.
You should read The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
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The winner of the Booker Prize 2000. Iris Chase – married at 18 to a politically prominent industrialist, but now 82 and poor – is living in Port Ticonderoga, a town dominated by her once-prosperous family. While bewailing her unreliable body and deriding those who try to help her, Iris reflects on her far from exemplary life and perilous times, particularly on the events surrounding her sister Laura’s mysterious early death - a death which confirmed her iconic status as the author of a scandalous novel.A multilayered drama that weaves its narrative threads across past and present, fiction and reality.
35.
You should read True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey
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The winner of the Booker Prize 2001.True History of the Kelly Gang is the song of Australia, and it sings its protest in Ned Kelly’s voice. Peter Carey gives us Ned Kelly as orphan, Oedipus, horse thief, farmer, bushranger, reformer, bank-robber, police-killer and finally, his country’s beloved Robin Hood. By the time of his hanging in 1880 a whole country would seem to agree that he was ‘the best bloody man that has ever been in Benalla’.Carey skilfully makes art from the life story of his country’s greatest outlaw, giving his true measure of that ‘best bloody man’.
36.
You should read Life of Pi by Yann Martel
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The winner of the Booker Prize 2002. Pi (Piscine) Molitor, grows up as the son of a zoo manager in India. As a boy, Pi practices not only Hinduism but also the teachings of Christianity and Islam – in his eyes, all different yet equal ways of knowing God. In 1976, when The Emergency is announced, the Molitors’ zoo animals are sold, and Pi and his family embark on a Japanese freight ship to North America. It sinks a few days into its passage. Pi is left alone on a lifeboat with a hyena, a zebra, an orangutan, and a tiger named Richard Parker. He is rescued after 227 days afloat, barring one excursion to a surreally depicted carnivorous island.
37.
You should read Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre
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The winner of the Booker Prize 2003. Vernon Gregory Little has secrets, but none of them, or so he assumes, have anything to do with the recent massacre of sixteen students at his high school. But the quirky Texan backwater of Martirio becomes a deadly crucible as all eyes turn on Vernon. He flees to Mexico but is captured and put on trial as Texas’ most notorious serial killer. Then, on the afternoon of his execution, Vernon conceives a wholly modern solution to his dilemma – one that calls for the greatest crime of all.
38.
You should read The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
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The winner of the Booker Prize 2004. It is the summer of 1983, and young Nick Guest has moved into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: Gerald, an ambitious new Tory MP, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their children. As the boom years of the mid-80s unfold, Nick, an innocent in matters of politics and money, becomes embroiled in the Feddens’ world, with its grand parties, its holidays in the Dordogne, its parade of monsters both comic and threatening.Alan Hollinghurst portrays a ruthless decade through Nick, an increasingly-less-innocent abroad, as he gets caught up in the boom years of the 80s.
39.
You should read The Sea by John Banville
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The winner of the Booker Prize 2005.Led back to Ballyless by a dream, Max Morden returns to the coastal town where he spent a holiday in his youth. The Grace family appeared that long-ago summer as if from another world. Drawn to the twins, Chloe and Myles, Max soon found himself entangled in their lives, which were as seductive as they were unsettling. What ensued haunts him for the rest of his years and shapes everything that is to follow.A man attempts to escape a recent loss while confronting a trauma from a long lost summer, in John Banville’s haunting and evocative novel.
40.
You should read The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
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The winner of the Booker Prize 2006. In the north-eastern Himalayas, at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga, in an isolated and crumbling house, lives an embittered old judge, who wants nothing more than to retire in peace. But with the arrival of his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, and the son of his chatty cook trying to stay a step ahead of US immigration services, this is far from easy. A funny and politically acute family saga about a peaceful retirement under siege from all sides.
41.
You should read The Gathering by Anne Enright
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The winner of the Booker Prize 2007. The nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan gather in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother Liam. It wasn’t the drink that killed him - although that certainly helped - it was what happened to him as a boy in his grandmother’s house, in the winter of 1968. The Gathering traces the line of hurt and redemption through three generations – starting with the grandmother, Ada Merriman – showing how memories warp and family secrets fester.A family epic about love and disappointment, condensed and clarified through the remarkable lens of Anne Enright's unblinking eye.
42.
You should read The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
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The winner of the Booker Prize 2008. The son of a rickshaw puller, Balram is taken out of school by his family and put to work in a teashop. As he crushes coals and wipes tables, he nurses a dream of escape - of breaking away from the banks of Mother Ganga, into whose depths have seeped the remains of a hundred generations. Balram’s subsequent journey from the darkness of village life to the light of entrepreneurial success is utterly amoral, deeply endearing and altogether unforgettable.Aravind Adiga’s brilliantly irreverent tale of two Indias charts one man’s evolution from village waiter to larcenous killer to amoral entrepreneur.
43.
You should read Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
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The winner of the Booker Prize 2009. 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 VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe oppose him. Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell. Son of a brutal blacksmith, Cromwell is a political genius, a briber, a bully and a charmer. He has broken all the rules of a rigid society in his rise to power, and is prepared to break some more. Hilary Mantel’s truly great novel peels back history to explore the rich intersection of individual psychology and wider politics in Tudor England.
44.
You should read The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson
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The winner of the Booker Prize 2010. Julian Treslove, a former BBC radio producer, and Sam Finkler, a popular Jewish philosopher, writer and television personality, are old school friends. Despite a prickly relationship, they’ve never quite lost touch with each other - or with their former teacher, Libor Sevcik. With both Libor and Sam recently widowed, and with Julian’s unsuccessful romantic record rendering him an honorary third, the three dine at Libor’s apartment. And that very evening, at exactly 11.30pm, everything changes. A scorching story of friendship and loss, exclusion and belonging, and of the wisdom and humanity of maturity, from the brilliant Howard Jacobson.
45.
You should read The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
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The winner of the Booker Prize 2011. Tony and his clique first met Adrian at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they navigated the sixth form together, trading in-jokes, rumour and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they all swore to stay friends. Now Tony is retired. He’s had a career and a marriage, a calm divorce. He’s certainly never tried to hurt anybody. Memory, though, is imperfect. It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer’s letter is about to prove.In Julian Barnes’ compelling novel, a middle-aged man is forced to reconsider his life when he is confronted with his imperfectly remembered past.
46.
You should read Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
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The winner of the Booker Prize 2012. England, 1535. Anne Boleyn, for whose sake Henry VIII has broken with Rome, has failed to do what she promised: bear a son to secure the Tudor line. Meanwhile, Henry has developed a dangerous attraction to Jane Seymour. The king’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, must negotiate a ‘truth’ that will satisfy Henry and secure his own career. But neither minister nor king will emerge unscathed from the bloody theatre of Anne’s final days.This gripping sequel to Wolf Hall is the second volume of Hilary Mantel’s remarkable trilogy charting the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell.
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You should read The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
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The winner of the Booker Prize 2013. It is 1866, and Walter Moody has come to make his fortune upon the New Zealand goldfields. On arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of 12 local men, who have met in secret to discuss a series of unsolved crimes. A wealthy man has vanished, a prostitute has tried to end her life, and an enormous fortune has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. Moody is soon drawn into the mystery: a network of fates and fortunes that is as complex and exquisitely patterned as the night sky.
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You should read The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan
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The winner of the Booker Prize 2014. In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the infamous Thailand-Burma Death Railway during World War Two, surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle’s young wife two years earlier. Struggling to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from beatings, he receives a letter that will change his life forever. A love story unfolds over half a century, as Richard Flanagan’s epic novel tells the unforgettable story of one man’s reckoning with the truth.
49.
You should read A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James
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The winner of the Booker Prize 2015. Jamaica, 1976. Seven gunmen storm Bob Marley’s house, machine guns blazing. The reggae superstar survives, but the gunmen are never caught. Marlon James investigates the story behind this near-mythical event. The result is a mesmerising, continent-crossing tale that spans three decades, with a shadowy cast of street kids, drug lords, journalists, prostitutes, gunmen and secret service agents. In a dazzling display of masterful storytelling, Marlon James explores the extraordinary backstory to the attempted assassination of Bob Marley.
50.
You should read The Sellout by Paul Beatty
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The winner of the Booker Prize 2016. The son of a pioneering sociologist believes that selling his father’s controversial memoir will solve the family’s financial woes. But when he realises there never was a memoir, drastic action is required… The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality – the Black Chinese restaurant.
51.
You should read Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
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The winner of the Booker Prize 2017. February, 1862. Two days after his death, 11-year-old Willie Lincoln is laid to rest in a marble crypt in a Georgetown cemetery. All that night, his father Abraham paces the darkness of the graveyard, shattered with grief. Meanwhile, Willie is trapped in a state of limbo between the dead and the living - drawn to his father with whom he can no longer communicate, existing in a ghostly world populated by the recently passed and the long dead. Narrated by a chorus of voices, George Saunders’ startlingly original novel is a thrilling exploration of death, grief and the possibilities of life.
52.
You should read Milkman by Anna Burns
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The winner of the Booker Prize 2018. In this unnamed city, to be interesting is dangerous. Middle sister, our protagonist, is busy attempting to keep her mother from discovering her maybe-boyfriend and to keep everyone in the dark about her encounter with Milkman. But when first brother-in-law sniffs out her struggle, and rumours start to swell, middle sister becomes ‘interesting’. The last thing she ever wanted to be. To be interesting is to be noticed and to be noticed is dangerous…
53.
You should read Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
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The winner of the Booker Prize 2019. Welcome to Britain and twelve very different people - mostly women, mostly Black - who call it home. Teeming with life and crackling with energy, Girl, Woman, Other follows them across the miles and down the years, through different generations and social classes, in this ever-dynamic, ever-expanding and utterly irresistible novel of our times. With vivid originality, irrepressible wit and sly wisdom, Bernardine Evaristo presents a gloriously new kind of history for this old country.
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You should read The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
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The winner of the Booker Prize 2019.‘And so I step up, into the darkness within; or else the light.’ When the van door slammed on Offred’s future at the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, what lay ahead for her? Freedom or prison? Life or death? The Testaments picks up the story 15 years after Offred stepped into the unknown, with the explosive testaments of three female narrators from Gilead. Margaret Atwood’s spellbinding sequel to The Handmaid's Tale was inspired by readers’ responses to the first book and ‘the world we’ve been living in’.
55.
You should read Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
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The winner of the Booker Prize 2020. 1981, Glasgow. The city is dying. Poverty is on the rise. When her philandering husband walks out, leaving her with three children, Agnes turns to alcohol for comfort. The children try their best to save her. Yet one by one they have to abandon her in order to save themselves. Shuggie still holds out hope. But Shuggie has problems of his own, despite all his efforts to pass as ‘normal’. Agnes wants to protect her son, but her addiction has the power to eclipse everything. And everyone. Douglas Stuart’s blistering and heartbreaking debut is an exploration of the unsinkable love that only children can have for their damaged parents.
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You should read The Promise by Damon Galgut
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The winner of the Booker Prize 2021. The narrator’s eye shifts and blinks, deliciously lethal in its observation of the crash and burn of a white South African family. On their farm outside Pretoria, the Swarts are gathering for Ma’s funeral. The younger generation detests everything the family stands for, not least the failed promise to the Black woman who has worked for them her whole life. After years of service, Salome was promised her own house, her own land, yet somehow, as each decade passes, that promise remains unfulfilled.
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You should read The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka
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The winner of the Booker Prize 2022. Maali Almeida, war photographer, gambler and closet gay, has woken up dead in what seems to be a celestial visa office. His dismembered body is sinking in the Beira Lake and he has no idea who killed him. At a time when scores are settled by death squads, suicide bombers and hired goons, the list of suspects is depressingly long. But even in the afterlife, time is running out for Maali. He has ‘seven moons’ to try and contact the man and woman he loves most and lead them to a hidden cache of photos that will rock Sri Lanka. A searing, mordantly funny satire set amid the murderous mayhem of a Sri Lanka beset by civil war.
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You should read Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
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The winner of the Booker Prize 2023. On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her doorstep. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police want to speak with her husband. Things are falling apart. Ireland is in the grip of a government that is taking a turn towards tyranny. And as the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a collapsing society – assailed by unpredictable forces beyond her control and forced to do whatever it takes to keep her family together. A mother faces a terrible choice, in his exhilarating, propulsive and confrontational portrait of a society on the brink.
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You should read Orbital by Samantha Harvey
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The winner of the Booker Prize 2024. Six astronauts rotate in the International Space Station. They are there to do vital work, but slowly they begin to wonder: what is life without Earth? What is Earth without humanity?Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents, and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day.The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part – or protective – of it.