T he Booker Prize was first awarded in 1969, with the aim of stimulating public interest in contemporary fiction. It was loosely based on France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt. At first, the prize was only open to writers from the British Commonwealth; it has subsequently been extended to all Anglophone writers. The prize ceremony, when the winner is announced, is broadcast live on the BBC, and even a short-listing for the prize has an enormous—even life-changing—impact on an author’s career. As we know that many of our readers like to work their way through the list of Booker Prize-winning novels, we’ve compiled the winning titles of the last two decades below for convenience.
2023
“The Booker Prize is the biggest fiction award in the UK and Ireland. Paul Lynch won the £50,000 prize in 2023 for Prophet Song, a darkly prophetic novel set in a near-future Ireland that the New York Times described as ‘an unsettling dystopian parable.’ In it, a biologist and mother of four must cope alone after the secret police take her husband into custody and the country descends into civil war. It’s earned comparisons with The Handmaid’s Tale and 1984, but Lynch has downplayed the ideological elements of the book” Read more...
Award-Winning Novels of 2023
Cal Flyn ,
Five Books Editor
2022
“The hero of this book is already dead. In the afterlife, he’s given a chance to revisit moments and places from his life, which took place during the Sri Lankan Civil War, in which the hero—who was a photographer—was ultimately killed. It’s a fantasy of a dead figure coming back, revisiting and understanding what happened, and also watching what the significance of their own life was. So at one level, it’s an enormous subject, almost a theological issue—what did this person do with their life? what does it add up to?—but it’s done, again, with enormous humour.” Read more...
The Best Fiction of 2022: The Booker Prize Shortlist
Neil MacGregor ,
Art Historians, Critics & Curator
2021
“It is a very introspective examination of the lives of a group of individuals, a study of a family and family dynamics, and an account of South Africa over the course of decades—from the later years of Apartheid, into the present. And he’s able to manage all of these registers with a seamlessness that is almost deceptively simple. There’s an incredible flow. It’s in four sections, and each of the sections is unbroken as a piece of narrative. But what he’s doing through it is moving you subtly from one person’s mind to somebody else’s mind, from the past into the present, from one kind of consciousness to another. To me it’s evocative of Virginia Woolf in the way that it brings together —as the human mind does—past and present, memory and subjectivities.” Read more...
The Best Fiction of 2021: The Booker Prize Shortlist
Maya Jasanoff ,
Historian
2020
“It’s tender and upsetting at the same time; but hopeful in the way it looks at family and desire. It’s one of those books where once you have engaged with the characters they will be hard to forget. It’s full of both heartwarming and heartbreaking situations. The author has pulled it off so well, it’s amazing to think that it is a debut.” Read more...
The Best Fiction of 2020: The Booker Prize Shortlist
Margaret Busby ,
Publisher
2019 joint winners
“I cannot imagine anyone not enjoying this novel. As an author she possesses a prolific voice; she’s got 12 voices, all of which are distinct and engaging and vulnerable in different ways and utterly compelling.” Read more...
The Best Fiction of 2019
Peter Florence ,
Margaret Atwood's much-anticipated sequel to her seminal feminist dystopia The Handmaid's Tale
Set 15 years after the close of The Handmaid's Tale, The Testaments is narrated by Aunt Lydia – who readers will remember as a cruel instructor during the handmaids' induction programme – and two younger women, Agnes and Daisy.
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“Obviously the book is totally fascinating as a print book. What happened with the audiobook is that because of the Netflix adaptation, a lot of the actors who were in the Netflix program were used for the audiobook production. “ Read more...
The 2020 Audie Awards: Audiobook of the Year
2018
Winner of the 2018 Booker Prize , Milkman is a disquieting tale of sexual harassment set in Belfast during The Troubles —or at least, that's what the reader must surmise. As with many aspects of this unusual novel, its setting is never made explicit. The narrator is a young, bookish woman feeling her way through life in a society soaked in fear and paranoia; when she finds herself the focus of unwanted advances from a shadowy dissident figure known only as 'the milkman,' local gossips go into overdrive. Must she accept her new, unasked-for status as a paramilitary hanger-on?
Milkman also won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 2019, and was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction in the same year.
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2017
George Saunders' wild ride of a novel, set in the cemetery where Abraham Lincoln's young son has been recently buried, takes excitingly experimental form. Be ready for rude ghosts, spectral humour, and a polyphonic chorus of voices.
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2016
"I loved The Sellout Rachel Kushner
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2015
Marlon James's third novel tells the story of an attempted assassination of Bob Marley in 1970s Jamaica and its chaotic aftermath, as CIA agents flooded in from overseas and violence flowed well beyond the island's shores. Michiko Kakutani, then of the New York Times, said it was "like a Tarantino remake of The Harder They Come but with a soundtrack by Bob Marley and a script by Oliver Stone and William Faulkner, with maybe a little creative boost from some primo ganja. It’s epic in every sense of that word: sweeping, mythic, over-the-top, colossal and dizzyingly complex."
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2014
The Narrow Road to the Deep North tells the story of Dorrigo Evans, a doctor from Tasmania who, as an old man, flashes back to his time in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, building the infamous Burma Railway.
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2013
This epic historical novel, set in a 19th-century New Zealand goldrush town, is ghost story, mystery, and extraordinarily ambitious work of literature in one. Successfully adapted into an acclaimed TV mini-series starring Eve Hewson and Eva Green in 2020.
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2012
The author almost becomes Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s adviser and key figure in both the rise and fall of Anne Boleyn
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“Hilary Mantel breathes life into history. You see the ruthlessness of Tudor society and you see the parallel with politics and power today. She just has an incredible way of making you smell and touch and feel everything. She brings alive the world and the fear: how easily people’s lives were expendable—one small thing and they were gone…In the second one, Anne Boleyn is executed. It’s very good in terms of the politics of it, how Anne Boleyn’s death happens.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction Set in England
Lesley Thomson ,
Thriller and Crime Writer
2011
2010
“This is a very funny book about middle-aged men fighting with each other and fighting to maintain their self-esteem in pathetic ways. It’s very accessible. Sam Finkler, a popular thinker, media personality, and bestselling author, and his friend Julian Treslove reconvene with their former professor, an older Jewish immigrant from the Czech Republic. The book is about how Jews are expected to cooperate with contemporary anti-Semitism. To be accepted, Finkler renounces and demonizes the state of Israel. This book came out in 2010; only in more recent years has the UK started to grapple with the open anti-Semitism in its society.” Read more...
The Best Books for Hanukkah
Dara Horn ,
Novelist
2009
***Winner of the 2009 Booker Prize***
Now we’re at Wolf Hall , the first book in historical novelist Hilary Mantel’s trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, henchman to King Henry VIII, who spearheaded the Reformation in England. It’s a very, very convincing depiction of life in 1530s England and it’s hard not to completely believe in—and sympathise with—the Thomas Cromwell character she creates. Given this book also won the Booker Prize , Wolf Hall scores highly both as history and as fiction.
The other books in the trilogy are Bring Up the Bodies, The Mirror and the Light ,
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“With Wolf Hall, I was right there in the Tudor era. Thomas Cromwell—or her version of Thomas Cromwell—really came alive for me. You live with him and his family. You have sympathy with him and his life and the way he operated. That’s what I want from books: that they take me into another world and immerse me in it…I forgot that she was a contemporary writer. I could have been reading something that was a journal of the times, it felt so real. It’s so clever how she uses the language. You’re not bogged down with the way they might have talked, but you have the rhythm of the language.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction Set in England
Lesley Thomson ,
Thriller and Crime Writer
2008
I think it is a wonderful book which is written in this very gripping Indian English. It is very high octane. Here is someone who has taken this phenomenon of the liberation of English into the global arena and turned it into literature.
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2007
In Enright's Booker Prize-winning novel, a group of Irish siblings gather for the wake for their wayward brother Liam. A thoughtful and sometimes darkly funny saga of a dysfunctional family.
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2006
The Indian author Kiran Desai's second novel leaps between the Himalayan foothills and New York City, in a purposefully dislocated narrative that interweaves the story of the violent 1980s rebellion of ethnic Nepalese in Kalimpong, West Bengal, with the emotional isolation and instability of immigrant life.
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2005
When the art historian Max Morden—grieving the loss of his wife—returns to a seaside village where he holidayed as a child, he relives his life-altering encounters with the well-heeled Grace family. For fans of L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between
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2004
Alan Hollinghurst's biting satire of uppercrust English society during the 1980s offers sexual awakening, social-climbing and political ambition set against the cultural upheaval and unrest of Margaret Thatcher's Britain. A modern classic that remains as vivid and compelling today as it was on first publication.
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