Our Booker Prize-Winning Books

The “devastatingly moving” (People) first novel from the author of Tenth of December: A moving and original father-son story featuring none other than Abraham Lincoln, as well as an unforgettable cast of supporting characters, living and dead, historical and invented.

A “thrilling, ambitious … intense” (Los Angeles Times) novel that explores the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in the late 1970s, from the author of Black Leopard, Red Wolf.

Moving deftly from a Japanese POW camp to present-day Australia, from the experiences of Dorrigo Evans and his fellow prisoners to that of the Japanese guards, this savagely beautiful novel tells a story of the many forms of love and death, of war and truth, as one man comes of age, prospers, only to discover all that he has lost.

A novel that follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he never much thought about — until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance: One of them from the grave, another maddeningly present.

An “extraordinary meditation on mortality, grief, death, childhood and memory” (USA Today) about a middle-aged Irishman who has gone back to the seaside to grieve the loss of his wife.

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 his own people, the lowly class of ordinary Australians, the bushranger is a hero, defying the authority of the English to direct their lives. Here is a classic outlaw tale, made alive by the skill of a great novelist.

The bestselling author of The Handmaid’s Tale 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.

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 find meaning in his one remaining relationship. Instead, an incident of unimaginable terror and violence forces father and daughter to confront their strained relationship and the equally complicated racial complexities of the new South Africa.

A sharp contemporary morality tale, cleverly disguised as a comic novel, Amsterdam is “a dark tour de force, perfectly fashioned” (The New York Times) from the bestselling author of Atonement.

An affluent Indian family is forever changed by one fateful day in 1969, from the author of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Compared favorably to the works of Faulkner and Dickens, Arundhati Roy’s modern classic is equal parts powerful family saga, forbidden love story, and piercing political drama.

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 pasts. Braiding these men’s voices, and that of Jack’s widow, into a choir of sorrow and resentment, passion and regret, Swift creates a testament to a changing England and to enduring mortality.

Set in the closing months of World War I, this towering novel combines poetic intensity with gritty realism as it brings Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy to its stunning conclusion.

Hilarious and poignant, Roddy Doyle’s witty, exuberant novel charts the triumphs, indignities, and bewilderment of a young boy and his world, a place full of warmth, cruelty, confusion, and love.

Michael Ondaatje’s bestseller lyrically portrays the convergence of four damaged lives in a bomb-riddled Italian villa in the last days of the war. Each is haunted in different ways by the riddle of the man they know only as the English patient, a nameless burn victim who lies in bandages in an upstairs room. It is this man’s incandescent memories that illuminate the story, and the consequences of the mysteries they reveal radiate outward in shock waves that leave all the characters forever changed.

A modern classic that reveals the tension between the land of the living, with its violence and political struggles, and the temptations of the carefree kingdom of the spirits.

A. S. Byatt’s beloved novel is a spellbinding intellectual mystery and an utterly transfixing love story.

Remains of the Day is Ishiguro’s profoundly compelling portrait of Stevens, the perfect butler, and of his fading, insular world in post-World War II England. 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 serving the “great gentleman,” Lord Darlington. But lurking in his memory are doubts about the true nature of Lord Darlington’s “greatness,” and much graver doubts about the nature of his own life.

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 become allied with a teenaged heiress who buys a glassworks to help liberate her sex. And only the prodigious imagination of Peter Carey could implicate Oscar and Lucinda in a narrative of love and commerce, religion and colonialism, that culminates in a half-mad expedition to transport a glass church across the Outback.

The powerful, visionary novel about the complicated relationships between three outcasts of mixed European and Maori heritage. The Bone People is a work of unfettered wordplay and mesmerizing emotional complexity.

When romance writer Edith Hope’s life begins to resemble the plots of her own novels, she flees to Switzerland, where the quiet luxury of the Hotel du Lac promises to restore her to her senses. Beautifully observed, witheringly funny, Hotel du Lac is Brookner at her most stylish and potently subversive.

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 life affirming novel goes to the center of human experience — the need for an interior, spiritual life; for some connections to the world in which we live; and for purity of vision.

This novel is at once a fascinating family saga and an astonishing evocation of a vast land and its people — a brilliant incarnation of the universal human comedy. Forty years after its publication, Midnight’s Children stands apart as both an epochal work of fiction and a brilliant performance by one of the great literary voices of our time.

A tale of the strange obsessions that haunt a playwright as he composes his memoirs which evolve into a riveting chronicle of the strange events and unexpected visitors — some real, some spectral — that disrupt his world and shake his oversized ego to its very core.

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, destroying his farm.

An insightful and thrilling novel about the British Empire in India during the Great Mutiny of 1857, as seen through the eyes of a young, love-struck idealist.

No writer has rendered our boundaryless, post-colonial world more acutely or prophetically than V. S. Naipaul, or given its upheavals such a hauntingly human face. By turns funny and terrifying, sorrowful and unsparing, In a Free State is Naipaul at his best.