All prizes United Kingdom
United Kingdom · Since 1969 · For books in English
Awarded each autumn by the Booker Prize Foundation in London to the best novel written in English and published in the UK or Ireland. Until 2013 it was open to Commonwealth, Irish and Zimbabwean authors; since 2014, to writers of any nationality.
The prize was founded in 1969 as the Booker Prize for Fiction, sponsored by the trading company Booker McConnell; from 2002 the Booker Prize Foundation ran it with the investment firm Man Group as sponsor, as the Man Booker Prize, and since 2019 it has been funded by Crankstart and carries the Booker name alone. A panel of five judges, appointed each year, chooses a longlist of about a dozen books, then a shortlist of six and the winner, announced at a ceremony in London in the autumn. The winner receives £50,000 and each shortlisted author £2,500. Only novels by Commonwealth, Irish, South African and later Zimbabwean citizens could win until 2014, when the prize opened to any novel written in English, a change that proved controversial. The rules require a single winner, but the 2019 judges split the prize between Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo.
Booker 2026 · Shortlist
John of John
Douglas Stuart · 50 when first published
Novel · 416 pages · Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Broke after art school, a young gay man takes the ferry back to his family's croft on the Hebridean island of Harris, home to his devout father and his outspoken Glaswegian grandmother, and keeps his secret to himself.
Booker 2026 · Shortlist
The Things We Never Say
Elizabeth Strout · 70 when first published
Novel · 224 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:A well-liked history teacher in a small town on the Massachusetts coast hides a deep loneliness behind a busy, ordinary life, until an unexpected discovery forces him to rethink the people closest to him.
Booker 2026 · Shortlist
Black Bag
Luke Kennard · 45 when first published
Novel · Satire, Love
AI-generated summary:A broke actor with no roles takes part in a psychology professor's study: through one autumn term he sits silently in the last row of a university lecture theatre, zipped inside a huge black bag.
Booker 2026 · Shortlist
The End of Everything
M. John Harrison · 81 when first published
Novel · Speculative, Satire
AI-generated summary:Years after a crisis no one fully understands, Phillip Tennent scrapes a living from what the Channel washes up, until he pulls from the water a shape-shifting creature he must carry inland.
Booker 2026 · Shortlist
The Disappearers
Marlon James · 56 when first published
Novel · 640 pages
AI-generated summary:In Kingston in 1988, a group of gay men come together to stage a frankly queer play, a risky act in a hostile Jamaica, and one night a crowd attacks them during rehearsal.
Booker 2026 · Shortlist
May We Feed the King
Rebecca Perry · 40 when first published
Novel · Historical
AI-generated summary:A curator who dresses historic rooms so they look just abandoned is commissioned to furnish the royal apartments of an old palace and grows fascinated by the reluctant king who once lived there.
Booker 2025 · Winner
Flesh
David Szalay · 51 when first published
Novel · 368 pages
AI-generated summary:Fifteen-year-old István, newly arrived in a Hungarian town and friendless at school, is drawn into a secret affair with the married woman next door, nearly his mother's age, and his life starts to run away from him.
Booker 2025 · Shortlist
The Land in Winter
Andrew Miller · 64 when first published
Novel · Historical, Family
AI-generated summary:In December 1962 two young couples live side by side in an English village: the doctor and his pregnant wife in an old house, and a farmer and his pregnant wife, haunted by a wild past, on the farm next door.
Booker 2025 · Shortlist
The Rest of Our Lives
Ben Markovits · 52 when first published
Novel · 240 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Twelve years after deciding to leave his wife once the children were grown, a New York law professor drops his daughter off at college in Pittsburgh and, instead of going home, keeps driving west.
Booker 2025 · Shortlist
Audition
Katie Kitamura · 46 when first published
Novel · 208 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:In a Manhattan restaurant, a celebrated stage actress in rehearsals for a premiere has lunch with a young man, young enough to be her son, and the question of what ties the two of them together begins to unsettle her life.
Also: Pulitzer 2026 finalist
Booker 2025 · Shortlist
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
Kiran Desai · 54 when first published
Novel · 688 pages · Love, Family, Migration
AI-generated summary:Sonia, an aspiring novelist back in India after college in Vermont, and Sunny, a struggling journalist in New York, meet on an overnight train, both embarrassed that their grandparents once tried to match them.
Booker 2025 · Shortlist
Flashlight
Susan Choi · 56 when first published
Novel · 464 pages · Family, Migration
AI-generated summary:One summer night in a Japanese seaside town, ten-year-old Louisa goes for a walk on the sea wall with her father, a Korean émigré; she is found on the sand the next day, and he has vanished, presumed drowned.
Booker 2024 · Winner
Orbital
Samantha Harvey · 48 when first published
Novel · 224 pages
AI-generated summary:A small crew of astronauts on the International Space Station spends one day circling the Earth sixteen times, running experiments, testing their bodies and, above all, watching the planet turn beneath them.
Booker 2024 · Shortlist
Held
Anne Michaels · 65 when first published
Novel · Historical, Family, War
AI-generated summary:In 1920 John, home in North Yorkshire after being badly wounded in the First World War, reopens his photography business beside Helena, an artist, but ghosts begin to appear in his pictures.
Booker 2024 · Shortlist
Stone Yard Devotional
Charlotte Wood · 58 when first published
Novel
AI-generated summary:Worn out by city life, a woman in her middle years goes back to the plains of her childhood and, almost without deciding to, joins a tiny community of nuns, although she has no belief in God.
Booker 2024 · Shortlist
James
Percival Everett · 68 when first published
Novel · 320 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:About to be sold away from his wife and child, an enslaved man runs off and ends up on a raft on the Mississippi with a white boy who has staged his own murder to get free of a brutal father.
Also: Pulitzer 2025 winner
Booker 2024 · Shortlist
Creation Lake
Rachel Kushner · 56 when first published
Novel · 416 pages · Politics, Crime
AI-generated summary:Sacked by the FBI, an American undercover operative named Sadie Smith is hired by shadowy private clients to work her way into a band of militant environmentalists in rural France who follow the ideas of a reclusive old thinker.
Booker 2024 · Shortlist
The Safekeep
Yael van der Wouden · 37 when first published
Novel · 272 pages · Historical, Love
AI-generated summary:In the Dutch countryside in 1961, Isabel keeps her late mother's house and every object in it in strict order, until her brother Louis leaves his new girlfriend Eva with her for the summer.
Booker 2023 · Winner
Prophet Song
Paul Lynch · 46 when first published
Novel · 320 pages · Politics, Speculative, Family
AI-generated summary:On a wet evening in Dublin, a scientist with four children opens her door to two officers of Ireland's new secret police, who have come to question her trade-unionist husband.
Booker 2023 · Shortlist
Western Lane
Novel · 176 pages · Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:After her mother dies, eleven-year-old Gopi is put through a hard, silent training regime by her father, and squash becomes her whole world as she drifts away from her sisters.
Booker 2023 · Shortlist
If I Survive You
Jonathan Escoffery · 42 when first published
Short stories · 272 pages · Family, Migration
AI-generated summary:Growing up in Miami as the son of Jamaican immigrants, Trelawny keeps being asked what he is, while he and his older brother Delano get through a feckless father, prejudice, the financial crash and a hurricane.
Booker 2023 · Shortlist
This Other Eden
Paul Harding · 56 when first published
Novel · 224 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:In 1912 the descendants of a formerly enslaved man and his Irish wife still live, poor and isolated, on the island the couple settled more than a century before, when a retired schoolteacher turned missionary arrives to teach their children.
Booker 2023 · Shortlist
The Bee Sting
Paul Murray · 48 when first published
Novel · 656 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:In a small Irish town after the financial crash, the Barnes family is coming apart: the father's car dealership is failing, the mother is selling her jewellery online, and both teenage children are going off the rails.
Booker 2023 · Shortlist
Study for Obedience
Sarah Bernstein · 36 when first published
Novel
AI-generated summary:A woman leaves her birthplace for a cold, isolated northern land to keep house for her brother after his wife leaves him, and soon a run of misfortunes strikes the farms around them.
Booker 2022 · Winner
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
Shehan Karunatilaka · 47 when first published
Novel · Satire, War, Crime
AI-generated summary:A war photographer, gambler and closeted gay man wakes up dead in a kind of celestial visa office in war-torn Colombo, unaware of who murdered him, with seven moons to reach the people he loves.
Booker 2022 · Shortlist
Treacle Walker
Alan Garner · 87 when first published
Novel
AI-generated summary:A boy with a lazy eye who lives by himself in an old Cheshire house, reading comics and gathering birds' eggs, befriends a strange wandering trader in rags and bones who comes down off the moor.
Booker 2022 · Shortlist
Small Things Like These
Claire Keegan · 53 when first published
Novel · 128 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:In a small Irish town in the weeks before Christmas 1985, a man who sells coal and timber, with a wife and daughters to support, makes a discovery while delivering to the convent.
Booker 2022 · Shortlist
Oh William!
Elizabeth Strout · 65 when first published
Novel · 256 pages · Family, Love
AI-generated summary:A writer in New York, recently widowed, agrees to join her first husband on a trip to look into a family secret he has just uncovered, decades after their marriage ended.
Booker 2022 · Shortlist
Glory
NoViolet Bulawayo · 41 when first published
Novel · Satire, Politics
AI-generated summary:In a land of talking animals, freed from colonial rule after a bloody war, an old horse has held power for decades, until his sudden fall sets off an uprising narrated by many animal voices.
Booker 2022 · Shortlist
The Trees
Percival Everett · 65 when first published
Novel · 288 pages · Crime, Satire
AI-generated summary:Detectives sent to Money, Mississippi, to investigate a string of brutal murders find beside each victim a second corpse resembling Emmett Till, the Black boy lynched in the town decades before.
Booker 2021 · Winner
The Promise
Damon Galgut · 58 when first published
Novel · Family, Politics
AI-generated summary:On a farm outside Pretoria, a white South African family gathers for the mother's funeral, divided by her deathbed pledge of a house and land to Salome, the Black servant who has spent her life working for them.
Booker 2021 · Shortlist
A Passage North
Anuk Arudpragasam · 33 when first published
Novel · 304 pages · War
AI-generated summary:When a phone call tells him that his grandmother's former caretaker has died in her village, a young man in Colombo takes the long train journey into Sri Lanka's war-torn north for the funeral.
Booker 2021 · Shortlist
Great Circle
Maggie Shipstead · 38 when first published
Novel · 608 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:Rescued as a baby from a sinking liner in 1914 and raised in Montana, a girl falls in love with flying; a century later, a Hollywood actress is cast to play her in a film about her disappearance.
Booker 2021 · Shortlist
The Fortune Men
Nadifa Mohamed · 40 when first published
Novel · Crime, Historical
AI-generated summary:In Cardiff in 1952, a young Somali sailor, a gambler and petty thief but no murderer, is accused of killing a shopkeeper in Tiger Bay and at first trusts that his innocence will protect him.
Booker 2021 · Shortlist
No One Is Talking About This
Patricia Lockwood · 39 when first published
Novel · 224 pages
AI-generated summary:A woman who has grown famous for what she posts online tours the globe to meet her followers, her mind ruled by the internet she calls the portal, until her mother sends two urgent messages.
Booker 2021 · Shortlist
Bewilderment
Richard Powers · 64 when first published
Novel · 288 pages · Family, Nature
AI-generated summary:A widowed astrobiologist raising his troubled, unusual nine-year-old son alone tries to keep the boy off psychiatric drugs as he grows ever more distressed about the state of the planet.
Booker 2020 · Winner
Shuggie Bain
Douglas Stuart · 44 when first published
Novel · 448 pages · Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:In early-1980s Glasgow, a gentle, lonely boy grows up on a bleak housing scheme beside his proud, glamorous mother, who turns to drink after her unfaithful husband leaves the family.
Booker 2020 · Shortlist
Burnt Sugar
Avni Doshi · 37 when first published
Novel · Family
AI-generated summary:A woman's mother, who in her youth left her marriage for an ashram and dragged her small child through years of rebellion, is now losing her memory, and the daughter must care for her.
Booker 2020 · Shortlist
Real Life
Brandon Taylor · 31 when first published
Novel · 336 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:A Black, gay biochemistry student from Alabama, keeping his distance from friends at a Midwestern university, faces a late-summer weekend in which a string of confrontations breaks down his defences.
Booker 2020 · Shortlist
The New Wilderness
Diane Cook · 44 when first published
Novel · 416 pages · Speculative, Nature, Family
AI-generated summary:With her small daughter sickening in a polluted, overcrowded city, a mother joins a group allowed to live as nomads in the last stretch of untouched land, the Wilderness State.
Booker 2020 · Shortlist
The Shadow King
Maaza Mengiste · 48 when first published
Novel · War, Historical
AI-generated summary:In Ethiopia in 1935, as Mussolini's army invades, an orphaned maid and other women who are meant only to nurse injured soldiers and bury those who fall want to fight.
Booker 2020 · Shortlist
This Mournable Body
Tsitsi Dangarembga · 59 when first published
Novel
AI-generated summary:Having quit a job that led nowhere, a proud woman who once expected success ends up in a shabby hostel in central Harare, where each new effort brings another humiliation.
Booker 2019 · Winner
Girl, Woman, Other
Bernardine Evaristo · 60 when first published
Novel · 464 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Twelve people in Britain, mostly women and mostly Black, from a London playwright on the eve of her opening night to a woman in her nineties on a northern farm, tell stories that span generations and cross in unexpected ways.
Booker 2019 · Winner
The Testaments
Margaret Atwood · 80 when first published
Novel · Speculative, Politics
AI-generated summary:Fifteen years after a handmaid vanished from Gilead's religious dictatorship, three women, the powerful Aunt Lydia, a girl raised inside Gilead and a teenager in Toronto, set down how their lives became entangled with the regime.
Booker 2019 · Shortlist
An Orchestra of Minorities
Chigozie Obioma · 33 when first published
Novel · Love, Migration
AI-generated summary:In Umuahia, Nigeria, a lonely chicken farmer named Chinonso stops a woman from jumping off a bridge by throwing two of his birds into the water, and the two fall in love against her wealthy family's wishes.
Booker 2019 · Shortlist
10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World
Elif Shafak · 48 when first published
Novel
AI-generated summary:In Istanbul a woman known as Tequila Leila has been murdered, and in the minutes her mind keeps working after her heart has stopped, she relives her life from a childhood in a provincial town onwards.
Booker 2019 · Shortlist
Ducks, Newburyport
Lucy Ellmann · 63 when first published
Novel · Family
AI-generated summary:An Ohio housewife who bakes pies for a living lets her thoughts run on in one long flow about her husband, her four children, her dead parents and the news of a violent, anxious America.
Booker 2019 · Shortlist
Quichotte
Salman Rushdie · 72 when first published
Novel · 416 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:An ageing, television-obsessed travelling salesman for a drug company becomes infatuated with a TV star and takes to the road across the United States with Sancho, the son he has imagined into being, to prove himself worthy of her.
Booker 2018 · Winner
Milkman
Anna Burns · 56 when first published
Novel · Politics, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:In an unnamed city in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, a young woman known only as middle sister, already thought odd for reading old novels as she walks, draws the unwanted attention of a senior paramilitary called the milkman.
Booker 2018 · Shortlist
Everything Under
Daisy Johnson · 28 when first published
Novel · 272 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Gretel, a lexicographer, tracks down the mother who left her sixteen years ago and remembers their wild childhood on a houseboat on the river, the private language they shared and the creature they feared in the water.
Booker 2018 · Shortlist
Washington Black
Esi Edugyan · 40 when first published
Novel · Historical
AI-generated summary:In 1830, Washington Black, an enslaved eleven-year-old cutting cane on a Barbados plantation, is made the servant of his master's brother Titch, a naturalist, inventor and abolitionist who is building a flying machine.
Booker 2018 · Shortlist
The Mars Room
Rachel Kushner · 50 when first published
Novel · 352 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:Romy Hall, once a dancer at a San Francisco strip club called the Mars Room, now faces two back-to-back life terms in a California women's prison, far from her young son.
Booker 2018 · Shortlist
The Overstory
Richard Powers · 61 when first published
Novel · 512 pages · Nature, Politics
AI-generated summary:Nine Americans, among them a botanist who finds that trees communicate, a game designer in a wheelchair and a student who briefly dies, are drawn by trees into the fight to save the last old-growth forests.
Also: Pulitzer 2019 winner
Booker 2018 · Shortlist
The Long Take
Robin Robertson · 63 when first published
Novel · War
AI-generated summary:Walker, a D-Day veteran from Nova Scotia haunted by the war, cannot face going home and drifts instead to Los Angeles, where he finds work as a reporter in a city being torn down and rebuilt.
Booker 2017 · Winner
Lincoln in the Bardo
George Saunders · 59 when first published
Novel · 368 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:On a February night in 1862, Abraham Lincoln returns to the Georgetown crypt of his eleven-year-old son Willie, whose spirit lingers among a crowd of restless ghosts caught between the living and the dead.
Booker 2017 · Shortlist
Autumn
Ali Smith · 54 when first published
Novel · 272 pages · Politics · Seasonal Quartet, book 1
AI-generated summary:In the months after the 2016 Brexit vote, Elisabeth, a young lecturer in London, looks back on her lifelong friendship with Daniel, her former neighbour, who is now a hundred years old and near the end of his life.
Booker 2017 · Shortlist
History of Wolves
Emily Fridlund · 38 when first published
Novel · 288 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Linda, a fourteen-year-old loner raised by unconventional parents in the Minnesota woods, befriends the young mother and four-year-old boy who move into the cabin across the lake, and starts babysitting for them.
Booker 2017 · Shortlist
Elmet
Fiona Mozley · 29 when first published
Novel · Family
AI-generated summary:Daniel, his sister Cathy and their father, a giant bare-knuckle fighter, live apart from everyone in a house he built with his own hands in a Yorkshire wood, until a powerful landowner nearby and his sons begin to circle them.
Booker 2017 · Shortlist
Exit West
Mohsin Hamid · 46 when first published
Novel · Migration, Love, Speculative
AI-generated summary:In a city swollen with refugees and sliding towards civil war, Saeed and Nadia fall in love, while rumours spread of mysterious black doors that can carry people out of the country to somewhere else.
Booker 2017 · Shortlist
4 3 2 1
Paul Auster · 70 when first published
Novel · 880 pages · Coming of age, Family
AI-generated summary:Archibald Isaac Ferguson is born on 3 March 1947, and from that single start his life splits into four parallel versions, four boys from the same beginnings growing up through mid-century America.
Booker 2016 · Winner
The Sellout
Paul Beatty · 53 when first published
Novel · 304 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:Raised in Dickens, a farming ghetto on the edge of Los Angeles, by a sociologist father who made him the subject of his experiments, a young Black man sets out to put his vanished town back on the map.
Booker 2016 · Shortlist
All That Man Is
David Szalay · 42 when first published
Novel
AI-generated summary:Nine men at different stages of life, from two English teenagers on a trip to an ageing diplomat, are each away from home somewhere in Europe, trying to work out what it means to be alive.
Booker 2016 · Shortlist
Hot Milk
Deborah Levy · 57 when first published
Novel · 224 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Sofia, twenty-five, has put her anthropology doctorate aside to care for her mother, Rose, whose legs fail her for no reason doctors can find; the two travel to a clinic on the Spanish coast run by a doctor of doubtful methods.
Booker 2016 · Shortlist
His Bloody Project
Graeme Macrae Burnet · 48 when first published
Novel · 288 pages · Crime, Historical
AI-generated summary:In 1869, a seventeen-year-old is arrested for a brutal triple murder in a remote village in the Scottish Highlands; his own memoir leaves no doubt that he did it, only the question of why.
Booker 2016 · Shortlist
Do Not Say We Have Nothing
Madeleine Thien · 42 when first published
Novel · 480 pages · Historical, Family, Politics
AI-generated summary:In Vancouver in 1991, ten-year-old Marie's family takes in a refugee who escaped China after the Tiananmen Square crackdown, and the guest's stories lead back into the hidden past of Marie's late father.
Booker 2016 · Shortlist
Eileen
Ottessa Moshfegh · 34 when first published
Novel · 272 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:In a small Massachusetts town in 1964, a 24-year-old secretary at a boys' prison looks after her alcoholic father and dreams of escape, until a glamorous new colleague arrives just before Christmas.
Booker 2015 · Winner
A Brief History of Seven Killings
Marlon James · 44 when first published
Novel · 688 pages · Politics, Crime, Historical
AI-generated summary:In December 1976, days before a concert meant to calm Kingston's political violence, seven gunmen storm Bob Marley's house; the attack and its aftermath are told by gang bosses, gunmen, journalists, CIA agents and a ghost.
Booker 2015 · Shortlist
A Spool of Blue Thread
Anne Tyler · 74 when first published
Novel · 368 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Red and Abby Whitshank are growing old in the roomy Baltimore house that has anchored their family for generations, and their grown children have to settle who will look after them.
Booker 2015 · Shortlist
The Fishermen
Chigozie Obioma · 29 when first published
Novel · 304 pages · Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:In a town in western Nigeria in the 1990s, four brothers use their strict father's absence to fish in a forbidden river, where a madman prophesies that the eldest will be killed by a fisherman.
Booker 2015 · Shortlist
A Little Life
Hanya Yanagihara · 41 when first published
Novel · 736 pages
AI-generated summary:Four college friends move to New York, broke and ambitious: an actor, a painter, an architect and a brilliant, guarded lawyer whose childhood remains a mystery to the others.
Booker 2015 · Shortlist
The Year of the Runaways
Sunjeev Sahota · 34 when first published
Novel · 400 pages · Migration
AI-generated summary:In a crowded house in Sheffield, young men who have left India to escape poverty, debt or violence look for work, each carrying obligations to the family back home and a past he would rather not speak of.
Booker 2015 · Shortlist
Satin Island
Tom McCarthy · 46 when first published
Novel · 192 pages
AI-generated summary:U., an anthropologist employed by a consultancy, is meant to write a Great Report that sums up the age, but he drifts instead through dossiers, data and the images the world throws at him.
Booker 2014 · Winner
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Richard Flanagan · 52 when first published
Novel · 467 pages · War, Love, Historical
AI-generated summary:In 1943, the Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans fights to keep the prisoners under his command alive in a Japanese camp on the Thai-Burma Death Railway, haunted by a love affair with his uncle's young wife.
Booker 2014 · Shortlist
How to Be Both
Ali Smith · 52 when first published
Novel · 384 pages
AI-generated summary:Two linked stories, printed in either order: a sixteen-year-old in present-day Cambridge mourns her mother, and a Renaissance painter of the 1460s remembers making frescoes in a palace in Ferrara.
Booker 2014 · Shortlist
J
Howard Jacobson · 72 when first published
Novel · 352 pages · Speculative, Love
AI-generated summary:Long after a catastrophe no one will name, a woodcarver in a seaside village, who touches his lips whenever he says a word beginning with J, falls in love with a young woman who knows nothing of her own past.
Booker 2014 · Shortlist
To Rise Again at a Decent Hour
Joshua Ferris · 40 when first published
Novel · 336 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:A New York dentist who loves the Red Sox and cannot believe in God finds that someone has set up a website and social media accounts in his name, and is using them to speak for an obscure religious people.
Booker 2014 · Shortlist
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
Karen Joy Fowler · 63 when first published
Novel · 320 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:A college student in California looks back on her Indiana childhood, when her psychologist father raised a chimpanzee named Fern alongside her as her sister, until Fern was suddenly gone.
Booker 2014 · Shortlist
The Lives of Others
Neel Mukherjee · 44 when first published
Novel · 528 pages · Family, Politics, Historical
AI-generated summary:Calcutta, 1967: the eldest grandson of a prosperous family slips away to join a militant peasant movement, leaving only a note, and the crowded household he leaves behind starts to come apart.
Booker 2013 · Winner
The Luminaries
Eleanor Catton · 28 when first published
Novel · 834 pages · Historical, Crime
AI-generated summary:In 1866 Walter Moody arrives on the New Zealand goldfields to make his fortune and stumbles on a secret meeting of twelve local men who have gathered to discuss a string of unsolved crimes.
Also: NZ Book Awards 2014 winner
Booker 2013 · Shortlist
The Testament of Mary
Colm Tóibín · 57 when first published
Novella · 96 pages
AI-generated summary:Years after her son's death, the mother of Jesus lives in exile and fear, visited by his followers who want her account for their gospel; she will not tell them what they wish to hear.
Booker 2013 · Shortlist
The Lowland
Jhumpa Lahiri · 46 when first published
Novel · 352 pages · Family, Politics
AI-generated summary:Two brothers born fifteen months apart grow up inseparable in 1960s Calcutta; one is drawn into the Naxalite rebellion, while the other leaves to do scientific research on the coast of New England.
Booker 2013 · Shortlist
Harvest
Jim Crace · 67 when first published
Novel · 224 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:The morning after the harvest, an English village wakes to two columns of smoke: one from a fire at the master's outbuildings, one from three strangers camped at the edge of the woods, on whom suspicion soon falls.
Booker 2013 · Shortlist
We Need New Names
NoViolet Bulawayo · 32 when first published
Novel · 296 pages · Coming of age, Migration
AI-generated summary:Ten-year-old Darling and her friends roam a Zimbabwean shantytown called Paradise, stealing guavas and dreaming of escape to America, Dubai or Europe, until Darling gets the chance to join an aunt in America.
Booker 2013 · Shortlist
A Tale for the Time Being
Ruth Ozeki · 57 when first published
Novel · 420 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:A lonely, bullied sixteen-year-old in Tokyo keeps a diary before she plans to die; across the Pacific, a novelist on an island off British Columbia finds it washed up in a Hello Kitty lunchbox.
Booker 2012 · Winner
Bring Up the Bodies
Hilary Mantel · 60 when first published
Novel · Historical, Politics · Wolf Hall Trilogy, book 2
AI-generated summary:England, 1535: Anne Boleyn has not given Henry VIII a son, the king is drawn to Jane Seymour, and his chief minister Thomas Cromwell must find a way to give Henry what he wants without losing his own footing.
Booker 2012 · Shortlist
The Lighthouse
Alison Moore · 41 when first published
Novel · Family
AI-generated summary:Futh, a middle-aged Englishman whose marriage has just ended, takes a ferry to Germany for a walking holiday, his thoughts returning to the mother who left him as a boy and to his first trip there with his father.
Booker 2012 · Shortlist
Swimming Home
Deborah Levy · 52 when first published
Novel · 176 pages
AI-generated summary:Arriving with his family at a holiday villa above Nice, Joe thinks he sees a corpse floating in the pool; it is Kitty Finch, alive and well, and for reasons of her own his wife lets her stay.
Booker 2012 · Shortlist
Narcopolis
Jeet Thayil · 53 when first published
Novel · 304 pages
AI-generated summary:In Rashid's opium den on Shuklaji Street in Old Bombay, addicts, pimps and poets drift through the smoke around a young woman who prepares the pipes, while rumours spread of a killer preying on the city's invisible poor.
Booker 2012 · Shortlist
The Garden of Evening Mists
Tan Twan Eng · 39 when first published
Novel · 350 pages · Historical, War
AI-generated summary:Malaya, 1949: Yun Ling Teoh, lone survivor of a Japanese wartime camp, asks Aritomo, once the Emperor of Japan's gardener, to make a garden in memory of her sister; instead he takes her on as his apprentice.
Booker 2012 · Shortlist
Umbrella
Will Self · 51 when first published
Novel · Historical
AI-generated summary:In 1971 the psychiatrist Zachary Busner, new to a mental hospital in north London, becomes fascinated by Audrey, a patient struck down by sleeping sickness in 1918 who has spent half a century in a near-catatonic state.
Booker 2011 · Winner
The Sense of an Ending
Julian Barnes · 65 when first published
Novel · 150 pages
AI-generated summary:Tony Webster, retired and amicably divorced, believes he has left his school years and his clever friend Adrian behind, until a lawyer's letter and an unexpected bequest make him look again at what he remembers.
Booker 2011 · Shortlist
Snowdrops
A. D. Miller · 37 when first published
Novel · Crime
AI-generated summary:Nick Platt, a young English lawyer in Moscow in the early 2000s, rescues two sisters, Masha and Katya, from a bag snatcher and is drawn into their company as winter comes on and his moral compass begins to spin.
Booker 2011 · Shortlist
Jamrach's Menagerie
Carol Birch · 60 when first published
Novel · 352 pages · Historical, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:In London in 1857, eight-year-old Jaffy Brown, a child of the East End slums, comes face to face with an escaped tiger and is saved by Mr Jamrach, a dealer in exotic animals, who later sends him to sea.
Booker 2011 · Shortlist
Half Blood Blues
Esi Edugyan · 33 when first published
Novel · 343 pages · Historical, War
AI-generated summary:Soon after the fall of Paris in 1940, Hieronymus Falk, a young Black German jazz trumpeter, is arrested in a café and vanishes; half a century later his bandmate Sid, the only witness, is persuaded to return to Berlin.
Booker 2011 · Shortlist
The Sisters Brothers
Patrick deWitt · 36 when first published
Novel · 330 pages · Historical, Crime
AI-generated summary:Oregon, 1851: the hired guns Eli and Charlie Sisters ride south toward California with orders to kill a man named Hermann Kermit Warm, though Eli, unlike his brother, is starting to doubt his trade.
Booker 2011 · Shortlist
Pigeon English
Stephen Kelman · 35 when first published
Novel · 288 pages · Coming of age, Migration, Crime
AI-generated summary:Eleven-year-old Harri Opoku, newly arrived from Ghana, lives with his mother and sister on the ninth floor of an inner-city estate in England; when a boy he knows is stabbed to death and nobody talks, he starts his own investigation.
Booker 2010 · Winner
The Finkler Question
Howard Jacobson · 68 when first published
Novel · 307 pages
AI-generated summary:After an evening with two recently widowed friends, the celebrity philosopher Sam Finkler and their old teacher Libor, a former BBC radio producer named Julian Treslove is mugged on his way home and begins to doubt who he is.
Booker 2010 · Shortlist
The Long Song
Andrea Levy · 54 when first published
Novel · 336 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:In Jamaica in the last years of slavery, July grows up enslaved on the Amity sugar plantation, under its mistress Caroline Mortimer; as an old woman she tells her story, urged on by her son, a printer.
Booker 2010 · Shortlist
In a Strange Room
Damon Galgut · 47 when first published
Novel
AI-generated summary:A young man travelling light makes three journeys, through Greece, India and Africa, and to the people he meets along the way he becomes in turn the Follower, the Lover and the Guardian.
Booker 2010 · Shortlist
Room
Emma Donoghue · 41 when first published
Novel · 336 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Five-year-old Jack has spent his whole life with his mother in a single locked room with a skylight, believing that only Room and the things in it are real, until Ma tells him there is a world outside.
Booker 2010 · Shortlist
Parrot and Olivier in America
Peter Carey · 66 when first published
Novel · 451 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:In the years after the French Revolution a nervous young aristocrat, Olivier, sails for America, officially to study its prisons, with Parrot, the motherless son of an English printer, sent along to guard him and spy on him.
Booker 2010 · Shortlist
C
Tom McCarthy · 41 when first published
Novel · 310 pages · Historical, War
AI-generated summary:Serge Carrefax is born into a world of transmissions: his father runs a school for deaf children and experiments with wireless, and Serge grows up beside his brilliant, troubled older sister Sophie in the years before the First World War.
Booker 2009 · Winner
Wolf Hall
Hilary Mantel · 57 when first published
Novel · 532 pages · Historical, Politics · Wolf Hall Trilogy, book 1
AI-generated summary:In 1520s England, Henry VIII has no male heir and wants a divorce the pope will not grant, and Thomas Cromwell, a blacksmith's son in Cardinal Wolsey's service, begins his rise at court.
Booker 2009 · Shortlist
The Children's Book
A. S. Byatt · 73 when first published
Novel · 688 pages · Family, Historical, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:In 1895 Olive Wellwood, a celebrated writer of fairy stories who writes a private book for each of her children, takes in Philip, a runaway boy her eldest son has found drawing in a London museum's cellars.
Booker 2009 · Shortlist
The Quickening Maze
Adam Foulds · 35 when first published
Novel · 258 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:In 1837 the poet John Clare, worn down by drink and depression, is a patient at High Beach, an asylum in Epping Forest, when the young Alfred Tennyson moves nearby so that his brother can be treated there.
Booker 2009 · Shortlist
Summertime
J. M. Coetzee · 69 when first published
Novel · 272 pages · Autofiction · Scenes from Provincial Life, book 3
AI-generated summary:A young English biographer writing about the late author John Coetzee interviews people who knew him in the 1970s, when he lived with his widowed father in a run-down cottage outside Cape Town.
Booker 2009 · Shortlist
The Little Stranger
Sarah Waters · 43 when first published
Novel · 501 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:One summer after the Second World War, a Warwickshire country doctor whose mother was once a maid is summoned to Hundreds Hall, the decaying Georgian house where the Ayres family has lived for two centuries.
Booker 2009 · Shortlist
The Glass Room
Simon Mawer · 61 when first published
Novel · 416 pages · Historical, War, Love
AI-generated summary:In Czechoslovakia at the end of the 1920s, the newlyweds Viktor and Liesel Landauer, a rich Jewish businessman and his gentile wife, commission a modernist architect to build them a house of steel and glass on a hill.
Booker 2008 · Winner
The White Tiger
Aravind Adiga · 34 when first published
Novel · Satire, Crime
AI-generated summary:Writing over seven nights to China's premier, Balram Halwai, a rickshaw-puller's son from a poor village on the Ganges, tells how he became a rich landlord's driver in Delhi and, as he puts it, an entrepreneur.
Booker 2008 · Shortlist
Sea of Poppies
Amitav Ghosh · 52 when first published
Novel · 515 pages · Historical, Migration · Ibis Trilogy, book 1
AI-generated summary:In 1838, on the eve of the Opium Wars, a village widow, a ruined raja, a mixed-race American sailor and a French orphan find their way onto the Ibis, an old slave ship bound from Calcutta to Mauritius.
Booker 2008 · Shortlist
The Clothes on Their Backs
Linda Grant · 57 when first published
Novel · 293 pages · Family, Migration
AI-generated summary:In a mansion block off London's Marylebone Road, the bookish only child of timid Hungarian refugees is ten when a flamboyant uncle she never knew existed turns up at the door and is thrown out of the flat.
Booker 2008 · Shortlist
The Northern Clemency
Philip Hensher · 43 when first published
Novel · 738 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:In 1974 the Sellers family moves from London to a Sheffield suburb on the very day that the husband across the street walks out, convinced his wife is having an affair.
Booker 2008 · Shortlist
The Secret Scripture
Sebastian Barry · 53 when first published
Novel · 300 pages · Historical, Family
AI-generated summary:Nearing her hundredth year and confined for decades to a mental hospital in Roscommon, Roseanne McNulty secretly writes the story of her life, while her psychiatrist tries to find out why she was committed.
Booker 2008 · Shortlist
A Fraction of the Whole
Steve Toltz · 36 when first published
Novel · 530 pages · Family, Satire
AI-generated summary:From an Australian prison cell, Jasper Dean sets down the story of his paranoid, philosophising father Martin and his outlaw uncle Terry, and of how the three of them came to scandalise a whole continent.
Booker 2007 · Winner
The Gathering
Anne Enright · 45 when first published
Novel · 260 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:When her wayward brother Liam drowns in the sea in England, Veronica Hegarty, one of the nine surviving children of a large Dublin family, brings his body home for the wake and starts digging into the family's past.
Booker 2007 · Shortlist
On Chesil Beach
Ian McEwan · 59 when first published
Novel · 203 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Newly married in the summer of 1962, a young history graduate and a violinist sit down to dinner at their honeymoon hotel by the sea in Dorset, each quietly dreading the night ahead.
Booker 2007 · Shortlist
Animal's People
Indra Sinha · 57 when first published
Novel · 374 pages · Politics
AI-generated summary:In the Indian city of Khaufpur, a foul-mouthed nineteen-year-old orphan whose spine was twisted by a poison gas leak from a chemical factory walks on all fours and calls himself Animal.
Booker 2007 · Shortlist
Mister Pip
Lloyd Jones · 51 when first published
Novel · Coming of age, War
AI-generated summary:On the island of Bougainville in 1991, as civil war closes in and the teachers have fled, the only white man left reopens the village school and reads Great Expectations aloud to thirteen-year-old Matilda and her classmates.
Also: NZ Book Awards 2007 winner
Booker 2007 · Shortlist
The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Mohsin Hamid · 36 when first published
Novel · 184 pages · Politics, Migration
AI-generated summary:Over one evening at a café in Lahore, a young Pakistani man tells a wary American stranger how he went from Princeton and a high-flying New York job to the life he leads now.
Booker 2007 · Shortlist
Darkmans
Nicola Barker · 41 when first published
Novel · 838 pages · Thames Gateway, book 3
AI-generated summary:In Ashford, Kent, remade by the new Channel Tunnel station, a cranky sixty-one-year-old shares a flat with the drug-dealing son he hardly speaks to, while the town's distant past seems to seep into the present.
Booker 2006 · Winner
The Inheritance of Loss
Kiran Desai · 35 when first published
Novel · 336 pages · Family, Migration, Politics
AI-generated summary:In a crumbling house below Mount Kanchenjunga, an embittered retired judge wants only peace, but his orphaned granddaughter arrives to live with him, while his cook's son dodges US immigration in New York kitchens.
Booker 2006 · Shortlist
Mother's Milk
Edward St Aubyn · 45 when first published
Novel · 240 pages · Family, Satire · Patrick Melrose, book 4
AI-generated summary:Over four Augusts in the early 2000s, a London barrister, his wife and their small sons stay at his mother's house in the south of France, which she means to give away to a New Age guru.
Booker 2006 · Shortlist
In the Country of Men
Hisham Matar · 36 when first published
Novel · 256 pages · Coming of age, Politics, Family
AI-generated summary:Tripoli, 1979: a boy of nine glimpses his father, supposedly abroad on business, across the busy market in dark glasses, and is drawn into a frightening adult world of secrets and fear.
Booker 2006 · Shortlist
The Secret River
Kate Grenville · 55 when first published
Novel · 334 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:In 1806 a London waterman's mistake gets him shipped to New South Wales for life with his family, and he lays claim to land on the Hawkesbury where Aboriginal people already live.
Also: Miles Franklin 2006 shortlist
Booker 2006 · Shortlist
Carry Me Down
M. J. Hyland · 38 when first published
Novel · Coming of age, Family
AI-generated summary:In Ireland in 1971 a boy of twelve, sure that he can tell when grown-ups lie, hopes to make the Guinness Book of Records one day, while his close but troubled family begins to come apart.
Booker 2006 · Shortlist
The Night Watch
Sarah Waters · 40 when first published
Novel · 450 pages · War, Love, Historical
AI-generated summary:Four Londoners scarred by the Second World War, among them a former ambulance driver, a woman with a painful secret and a young man with a past, carry their secrets into 1947; the story then runs backwards to 1941.
Booker 2005 · Winner
The Sea
John Banville · 60 when first published
Novel · 263 pages
AI-generated summary:Soon after a loss, an ageing art historian returns to the coastal village of a boyhood holiday, the summer he was drawn into the lives of a glamorous family and their twins.
Booker 2005 · Shortlist
The Accidental
Ali Smith · 43 when first published
Novel · 305 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:A family's dreary summer holiday in Norfolk is thrown into disorder by the arrival of an alluring young woman named Amber, whom each of them assumes somebody else must know.
Booker 2005 · Shortlist
Arthur & George
Julian Barnes · 59 when first published
Novel · 352 pages · Historical, Crime
AI-generated summary:Two boys are raised far apart in late Victorian Britain, one in genteel poverty in Edinburgh, the other in a Staffordshire vicarage; years later a sensational run of crimes brings the famous writer and the obscure solicitor together.
Booker 2005 · Shortlist
Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro · 51 when first published
Novel · 288 pages · Speculative, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Now thirty-one, a woman looks back on her childhood with two close friends at Hailsham, a secluded school in rural England whose pupils were raised to think of themselves as special.
Booker 2005 · Shortlist
A Long Long Way
Sebastian Barry · 50 when first published
Novel · 304 pages · War, Historical, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:In 1914 a Dublin boy of barely eighteen leaves home and his sweetheart to fight for the British Army against the Germans, while in Ireland tensions build towards the Easter Rising.
Booker 2005 · Shortlist
On Beauty
Zadie Smith · 30 when first published
Novel · 445 pages · Family, Satire
AI-generated summary:A professor at a college on the American East Coast, in disgrace at home after doing something foolish, faces the arrival in town of his old rival, a British academic, and his family.
Booker 2004 · Winner
The Line of Beauty
Alan Hollinghurst · 50 when first published
Novel · 501 pages · Politics, Love
AI-generated summary:In 1983 a twenty-year-old who knows nothing of politics or money moves into the attic of a wealthy Notting Hill family headed by an ambitious Conservative MP, and is drawn into their world.
Booker 2004 · Shortlist
Bitter Fruit
Achmat Dangor · 53 when first published
Novel · 254 pages · Politics, Family
AI-generated summary:Twenty years after a police lieutenant assaulted his wife while he sat locked in a van, a former ANC activist runs into the man by chance, just as South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission is about to report.
Booker 2004 · Shortlist
The Master
Colm Tóibín · 49 when first published
Novel · 359 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:In January 1895 the novelist Henry James waits anxiously in London for the opening of his first play; when it fails, he goes back to his desk, as ill at ease in public as he is lonely in private.
Booker 2004 · Shortlist
Cloud Atlas
David Mitchell · 35 when first published
Novel · 528 pages · Speculative, Historical
AI-generated summary:Six linked lives, from an unwilling voyager on the Pacific in 1850 to a young islander who sees civilisation fall far in the future, echo through one another across time and genre.
Booker 2004 · Shortlist
I'll Go to Bed at Noon
Gerard Woodward · 43 when first published
Novel · 437 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:In the north London suburbs in 1970, a mother with a fondness for drink of her own watches alcohol take hold of her family, from her grieving brother to her gifted eldest son.
Booker 2004 · Shortlist
The Electric Michelangelo
Sarah Hall · 30 when first published
Novel · 340 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Raised in his mother's guest house on Morecambe Bay, a boy is apprenticed to a hard-drinking tattoo artist, then crosses to America and sets up his own parlour on the Coney Island boardwalk.
Booker 2003 · Winner
Vernon God Little
DBC Pierre · 42 when first published
Novel · Satire, Crime
AI-generated summary:After his best friend shoots sixteen classmates and himself in a small Texas town, fifteen-year-old Vernon Little is held as an accomplice and becomes the media's favourite suspect.
Booker 2003 · Shortlist
Astonishing Splashes of Colour
Clare Morrall · 51 when first published
Novel · 327 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:A young woman who sees people and feelings as colours, and whose husband lives in the flat next door, is knocked off balance by the loss of a child that never was, until a long-kept family secret comes out.
Booker 2003 · Shortlist
The Good Doctor
Damon Galgut · 40 when first published
Novel · 215 pages · Politics
AI-generated summary:At an almost empty country hospital in South Africa after apartheid, a jaded doctor is made to room with an eager young recruit determined to take medicine out to the villages.
Booker 2003 · Shortlist
Oryx and Crake
Margaret Atwood · 64 when first published
Novel · 378 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:A man who calls himself Snowman, perhaps the last human alive, sleeps in a tree and is slowly starving in a ruined world, grieving for his friend Crake and for Oryx, whom both men loved.
Booker 2003 · Shortlist
Brick Lane
Monica Ali · 36 when first published
Novel · Migration, Family, Love
AI-generated summary:At eighteen, Nazneen leaves her Bangladeshi village for an arranged marriage to an older man and a small council flat in London's East End, without any English.
Booker 2003 · Shortlist
Notes on a Scandal
Zoë Heller · 38 when first published
Novel · 256 pages
AI-generated summary:A lonely, long-serving history teacher befriends the school's charming new art teacher, and when the younger woman is exposed for sleeping with an underage pupil, sets down her own version of events in her defence.
Booker 2002 · Winner
Life of Pi
Yann Martel · 38 when first published
Novel · 352 pages · Coming of age, Migration
AI-generated summary:When the ship carrying an Indian zookeeper's family and some of their animals to Canada sinks, sixteen-year-old Pi is left adrift on the Pacific in a lifeboat whose other survivors include a Bengal tiger.
Booker 2002 · Shortlist
Unless
Carol Shields · 67 when first published
Novel · 213 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Reta Winters, a translator and writer of light fiction with a happy family, is shaken when her eldest daughter drops out of university to sit on a Toronto street corner with a sign reading 'Goodness'.
Booker 2002 · Shortlist
Family Matters
Rohinton Mistry · 50 when first published
Novel · Family
AI-generated summary:In Bombay, a widowed professor of seventy-nine with Parkinson's breaks his ankle, and his resentful stepchildren pass him on to his younger daughter's family in their small, crowded flat.
Booker 2002 · Shortlist
Fingersmith
Sarah Waters · 36 when first published
Novel · 600 pages · Historical, Crime, Love
AI-generated summary:In 1862 London, Sue Trinder, an orphan raised among a family of thieves, agrees to help a con man seduce a naive heiress by becoming her maid, so that the heiress can be locked away in an asylum.
Booker 2002 · Shortlist
Dirt Music
Tim Winton · 41 when first published
Novel · 465 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:In a crayfishing town on Western Australia's coast, Georgie Jutland, forty and adrift beside a widower she doesn't love, is drawn to Luther Fox, a fish poacher and outcast fleeing his own past.
Also: Miles Franklin 2002 winner
Booker 2002 · Shortlist
The Story of Lucy Gault
William Trevor · 74 when first published
Novel · Historical, Family
AI-generated summary:In 1921, as rebels threaten Protestant landowners, the Gaults prepare to leave their Irish country house, but their young daughter Lucy, who cannot bear to go, runs away the day before they leave.
Booker 2001 · Winner
True History of the Kelly Gang
Peter Carey · 57 when first published
Novel · 401 pages · Historical, Crime
AI-generated summary:On the run from the police in colonial Victoria, the bushranger Ned Kelly writes the story of his life for the daughter he has never seen, in unpunctuated, half-schooled prose.
Also: Miles Franklin 2001 shortlist
Booker 2001 · Shortlist
Hotel World
Ali Smith · 39 when first published
Novel · 236 pages
AI-generated summary:A nineteen-year-old chambermaid dies after a fall down a hotel dumbwaiter shaft; her lingering ghost and four living women linked to that night, among them her grieving sister, tell their stories.
Booker 2001 · Shortlist
Oxygen
Andrew Miller · 41 when first published
Novel · Family
AI-generated summary:In the summer of 1997, a dying widow in the West Country is nursed by one son while the other struggles in America, and a Hungarian playwright in Paris is haunted by 1956.
Booker 2001 · Shortlist
number9dream
David Mitchell · 32 when first published
Novel · 418 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Young Eiji Miyake leaves his island home in rural Japan for Tokyo to track down the father he has never met, and stumbles into a city where dreams, games and gangland violence blur.
Booker 2001 · Shortlist
Atonement
Ian McEwan · 53 when first published
Novel · 372 pages · War, Love, Family
AI-generated summary:In the stifling summer of 1935, at her family's country house, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis misreads what passes between her sister Cecilia and Robbie, whose mother cleans for the family, and makes an accusation that will shape all three lives.
Booker 2001 · Shortlist
The Dark Room
Rachel Seiffert · 30 when first published
Novel · 391 pages · War, Historical, Family
AI-generated summary:Three ordinary Germans live through the Nazi era and its aftermath: a young photographer in 1930s Berlin, a girl leading her siblings across a defeated country in 1945, and a teacher decades later asking what his grandfather did.
Booker 2000 · Winner
The Blind Assassin
Margaret Atwood · 61 when first published
Novel · 521 pages · Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:In old age, Iris Chase looks back on her privileged Ontario childhood and on her younger sister Laura, who drove off a bridge in 1945 and left behind a scandalous novel about two secret lovers.
Booker 2000 · Shortlist
The Deposition of Father McGreevy
Brian O'Doherty · 71 when first published
Novel · 404 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:In the 1950s a London editor returns to his native Kerry to learn why a remote mountain village was abandoned, and finds the deposition of its priest, who watched its women die and its people fall under suspicion.
Booker 2000 · Shortlist
When We Were Orphans
Kazuo Ishiguro · 46 when first published
Novel · Historical, Crime
AI-generated summary:Christopher Banks, a celebrated London detective, was orphaned as a boy in Shanghai when his parents vanished; in 1937 he returns to the city, now at war, determined to find out what became of them.
Booker 2000 · Shortlist
English Passengers
Matthew Kneale · 40 when first published
Novel · Historical
AI-generated summary:In 1857 a Manx smuggling captain charters his ship to two Englishmen bound for Tasmania: a vicar seeking the Garden of Eden and a doctor with a sinister theory of race, while an Aboriginal man recounts his people's struggle.
Also: Miles Franklin 2001 shortlist
Booker 2000 · Shortlist
The Keepers of Truth
Michael Collins · 36 when first published
Novel · 288 pages · Crime, Satire
AI-generated summary:In a dying factory town in 1980s America, a young reporter on the local paper is drawn into the case of a farmer who has vanished, and of the brutish son everyone suspects of killing him.
Booker 2000 · Shortlist
The Hiding Place
Trezza Azzopardi · 39 when first published
Novel · 282 pages · Family, Migration
AI-generated summary:In 1960s Cardiff, Dolores, last-born of the six girls of a Maltese gambler and his Welsh wife, grows up in the docklands of Tiger Bay, marked from birth by her father's losses and a house fire.