Oscar and Lucinda : A Novel (Man Booker Prize Winner)

Sir Peter Carey, Peter Carey, Peter Carey

This novel, by the author of "Oscar and Lucinda", tells the story of a man who, recovering from death, is convinced that he is in hell. For the first time in his life, Harry Joy sees the world as it really is, and takes up a notebook to explore and notate the true nature of the Underworld. Lire plus…

Iris Murdoch; Introduction By Mary Kinzie

Iris Murdoch turns her microscopic gaze on vanity and obsession in her 19th novel - a tale of the strange obsessions that haunt a playwright as he composes his memoirs"... a rich and textured study of vanity and self-delusion." - The GuardianCharles 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."One of the best and most influential writers of the 20th century... She connected goodness, against the temper of the times, not with the quest for an authentic identity so much as with the happiness that can come about when that quest can be relaxed." — Peter Conradi, The GuardianIris Murdoch made her writing debut with Under the Net in 1954. She wrote 26 novels and several books of philosophy that include the Booker prize-winning The Sea, The Sea (1978), the James Tait Black Memorial prize-winning The Black Prince (1973) and the Whitbread prize-winning The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974). Iris Murdoch had a number of other novels on the long and shortlists for the Booker Prize over the years, including A Fairly Honourable Defeat... Lire plus…

D.b.c. Pierre (Author) Tanya Ronder (Adapter)

In DBC Pierre’s darkly comic debut novel, an acerbic, foul-mouthed 15-year-old boy goes on the run after a mass shooting at his Texas high school. 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."Narrated in the highly idiomatic voice of Vernon Gregory Little, a fifteen-year-old Texas boy whose rotten luck it is to find himself a ‘skate-goat’ in the aftermath of a Columbine-type massacre of sixteen high-school students committed by his best friend, Vernon God Little is raucous and brooding, coarse and lyric, corrosive and sentimental in about equal measure... Pierre has a flawless ear for adolescent-boy speech. To his young narrator, virtually every adjective is ‘fucken’ and every vision of every adult is laced with repugnance, especially those adults in authority ... The novel is a curious admixture of high-decibel video-game farce and interludes of sobriety during which the author’s mask slips and we find ourselves in the presence not of the hormone-tormented Vernon but of a rueful adult male contemplating ‘this dry residue of horror.’ ... Lire plus…

J M Coetzee; Secker & Warburg

In his first Booker Prize-winning novel, J.M. Coetzee sets his main character on an arduous physical journey, which becomes a quest for inner freedom.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; meaningful connections to the world in which we live; and purity of vision."If Life & Times of Michael K has a flaw, it is in the last-minute imposition of an interior choral interpretation. In the final quarter, we are removed, temporarily, from the plain seeing of Michael K to the self-indulgent diary of the prison doctor who struggles with the entanglements of an increasingly abusive regime. But the doctor's commentary is superfluous; he thickens the clear tongue of the novel by naming its "message" and thumping out ironies." - Cynthia Ozick, The New York Times Book ReviewJohn Maxwell Coetzee is an author and academic from South Africa. He became an Australian citizen in 2006 after relocating there in 2002. A novelist and literary critic as well as a translator, Coetzee has won the Booker Prize twice and was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. Lire plus…

Sir Peter Carey, Peter Carey

Peter Carey’s contemporary classic is a dazzling comic account of one man’s unbelievable exploits across the Australian continent. “It is impossible to convey in a review the cumulative brilliance and accelerating hilarity of the prose" (London Review of Books)In Australian slang, an Illywhacker is a country fair con man, an unprincipled seller of fake diamonds and dubious tonics. And Herbert Badgery, the 139-year-old narrator of Peter Carey's uproarious novel, may be the king of them all. Vagabond and charlatan, aviator and car salesman, seducer and patriarch, Badgery is a walking embodiment of the Australian national character — especially of its proclivity for tall stories and barefaced lies. “Carey can spin a yarn with the best of them.... Illywhacker is a big, garrulous, funny novel.... If you haven’t been to Australia, read Illywhacker. It will give you the feel of it like nothing else I know.” - Howard Jacobson, The New York Times Book ReviewPeter Carey is an Australian author who has won the Booker Prize twice, for Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang. He has also won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize twice (for Jack Maggs and True History of the Kelly Gang), and the Miles Franklin Literary Award three times (for Bliss, Oscar and Lucinda and Jack Maggs). He was shortlisted for The Man Booker International Prize in 2009 for his entire body of work. He is an Officer of the Order of Australia and a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and... Lire plus…

Howard Jacobson

A scorching story of friendship and loss, exclusion and belonging, and of the wisdom and humanity of maturity, from the brilliant Howard Jacobson.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."Mr. Jacobson doesn’t just summon Roth; he summons Roth at Roth’s best. This prizewinning book is a riotous morass of jokes and worries about Jewish identity, though it is by no means too myopic to be enjoyed by the wider world. It helps that Mr. Jacobson’s comic sensibility suggests Woody Allen’s, that his powers of cultural observation are so keen, and that influences as surprising as Lewis Carroll shape this book... Treslove so loathes his old friend Finkler that he has turned ‘Finkler’ into his own private synonym for ‘Jew.’ So the real meaning of the book’s title, The Finkler Question, is The Jewish Question, and that’s only where the Finklerisms begin. Obsessively, and with a razor-sharp acuity that justifies the Roth comparisons, Mr. Jacobson has Treslove begin cataloging what he thinks are Finkler traits, Finkler talents, Finkler... Lire plus…

Paul Scott

In this sequel to The Raj Quartet, 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. Staying On won the Booker Prize in 1977 and was made into a motion picture starring Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson in 1979."Staying On far transcends the events of its central action. . . . [The work] should help win for Scott . . . the reputation he deserves—as one of the best novelists to emerge from Britain's silver age."—Robert Towers, Newsweek"Scott's vision is both precise and painterly. Like an engraver cross-hatching in the illusion of fullness, he selects nuances that will make his characters take on depth and poignancy."—Jean G. Zorn, New York Times Book Review"A graceful comic coda to the earlier song of India. . . . No one writing knows or can evoke an Anglo-Indian setting better than Scott."—Paul Gray, Time"Staying On provides a sort of postscript to [Scott's] deservedly acclaimed The Raj Quartet. . . . He has, as it were, summoned up the Raj's ghost in Staying On. . . . It is the story of the living death, in retirement, and the final end of a walk-on character from the quartet. . . . Scott has completed the task of covering in the... Lire plus…

David Storey

Set in and around the Second World War, David Storey’s tale about a boy from a mining town who grows away from his roots won the Booker Prize in 1976."Mesmerically readable, 'Saville' is a revelation. It is alive with light and air and a kind of perpetual motion." - Michael Ratcliffe, The TimesSaville 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."Reading this magnificent book is like drinking pure spring water from cupped hands. It has no false notes, no heaviness of emphasis, no editorial manipulations of plot to prove a point. One becomes so totally involved in the lives of these people that their every word and action becomes charged with meaning... Reminiscent of a nineteenth-century classic." - Jeremy Brooks, Sunday TimesDavid Storey studied at the Slade School of Art, before a writing career that yielded 15 plays and 11 novels. His novels include This Sporting Life, which was made into an acclaimed film starring Richard Harris. Storey’s work won many prizes, including the Macmillan Fiction Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Faber Memorial Prize and, in 1976, the Booker Prize, for Saville. Lire plus…

Michael Ondaatje

Set in 1945, Michael Ondaatje’s brilliant and moving historical fiction has been translated into 40 languages and turned into an Oscar-winning film.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."A challenging, disorienting, periodically captivating journey without maps, best when least showy, as in the marvellous account of Kip's adoption by an eccentric English peer, his bomb-disposal instructor." - Kirkus Reviews"That rare novel which gets under your skin and insists you return to it time and again, always yielding a new surprise or delight." - Kamila Shamsie, Golden Man Booker Prize judgeMichael Ondaatje is the author of seven novels, a memoir, a non-fiction book on film and several books of poetry. The English Patient won the Booker Prize in 1992 and the Golden Booker in 2018; Anil’s Ghost won the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the Giller Prize, and the Prix Médicis. Ondaatje was also shortlisted, for his entire body of work, for The Man Booker International Prize 2007. Born in Sri Lanka, Michael Ondaatje now lives in Toronto. Lire plus…

J. M. Coetzee

J.M. Coetzee became the first author to win the Booker twice with this tale set in post-apartheid South Africa, where a professor’s complacency contributes to his utter downfall. In this wry, visceral, yet strangely tender novel, Coetzee once again tells "truths [that] cut to the bone" (The New York Time Book Review).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."Any novel set in post-apartheid South Africa is fated to be read as a political portrait, but the fascination of Disgrace—a somewhat perverse fascination, as some will feel—is the way it both encourages and contests such a reading by holding extreme alternatives in tension. Salvation, ruin. Even a single paragraph can accommodate the transformation of hope into its opposite.” - Adam Mars-Jones, The GuardianJ. M. Coetzee is a multi-award-winning author and was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. His works of fiction include Dusklands; Waiting for the Barbarians, which won South Africa’s highest literary honour, the Central News Agency Literary Award; and Life & Times of Michael K., for which Coetzee was... Lire plus…

Ian Mcewan

A fragile friendship descends into hatred and revenge, in Ian McEwan’s darkly humorous 1998 Booker Prize-winning novel. "(F)unnier than anything McEwan has written before, though just as lethal" (Gabrielle Annan, The New York Review of Books).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."The boiling wit of Amsterdam won't be everyone's cup of tea, but those thirsty for satire will gulp down this little book... McEwan writes the sort of scathing retorts and witty repartee we wish we could think of in the heat of battle. On a broader scale, his portrayal of the symbiotic relationship between politicians and journalists is as damning as it is comic... This is a dark morality tale in the spirit of Evelyn Waugh's best work." - Ron Charles, The Christian Science MonitorIan McEwan is a critically acclaimed author and winner of the 1998 Booker Prize. His collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the 1975 Somerset Maugham Award. His novels include The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award; The Cement Garden; Enduring Love; Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize; Atonement;... Lire plus…

Kingsley Amis

Kingsley Amis won the 1986 Booker for The Old Devils, which is considered by many, including his son and fellow author Martin, to be his masterpiece. A pub gathering of elderly married couples devolves into mischief in this “sharp and funny” British comedy about marriage, aging, and friendship (The Washington Post).""The talk is also exceedingly sharp and funny, and it brings the characters to life as only pungent dialogue can. His prose is as tart as ever, which is of course good news, but the softening effect of his feelings for his old devils is even more welcome. More than in any of his previous novels, Kingsley Amis has allowed himself to show a bit of heart; it becomes him." - Jonathan Yardley, The Washington PostDo 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."Kingsley Amis’s most ambitious book is neither a sendup nor an exercise in some established genre. It sets forth a large cast of characters rendered in depth as well as on the surface. The Old Devils is also Mr Amis’s most inclusive novel, encompassing kinds of feelings and tone that move from sardonic gloom to... Lire plus…

Barry Unsworth

Barry Unsworth’s gripping historical novel about the Atlantic slave trade shared the 1992 Booker Prize with Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient.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."Sacred Hunger is written by the British novelist Barry Unsworth... It's as brutal a portrait of human behaviour as you're ever going to read... Unsworth takes you up the humming mainmast, throws you sideways in the house-high waves and chains you inside the foul underdeck were waves of human excrement slosh through the slaves' quarters as the merciless sea — charted by the equally merciless captain — rocks the hull outside... And yet at the same time, the book is also laced with a gentle, nimble understanding of the contrary impulses of human nature. " - Ethan Canin, NPRBarry Unsworth has published 17 novels and is best known for his historical fiction. He was shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times, winning once for the 1992 novel Sacred Hunger. In the last years of his life, he lived in Perugia, a city in the Umbria region of Italy, with his second... Lire plus…

Hollinghurst, Alan

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.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, and its parade of monsters both comic and threatening."As a novelist, Alan Hollinghurst has set himself an intimidating standard. There haven't been many English debuts more exquisitely executed or scorchingly candid than "The Swimming-Pool Library" (1988), nor follow-ups that could outdazzle it as brilliantly as did "The Folding Star" (1994)... Although it gathers ominously in mood, "The Line of Beauty" feels more blissful than baleful in its anatomy of the era... Hollinghurst's alertness to the tiniest social and tonal shifts never slackens, and positively luxuriates in a number of unimprovably droll set pieces... It is highly characteristic of Hollinghurst to oscillate between the high and the low, often within the same paragraph... It is also of a piece with the elegiac close, rendered with a grace and decorum entirely appropriate to this outstanding novel." - Anthony Quinn, The New York TimesAlan Hollinghurst is a novelist, poet, short story... Lire plus…

Brookner, Anita

Anita Brookner’s Booker Prize-winning novel focuses on a novelist who has taken refuge from life in a hotel on the misty shores of Lake Geneva."Her technique as a novelist is so sure and so quietly commanding." - Hilary Mantel, The Guardian UKEdith 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."A smashing love story. It is very romantic. It is also humorous, witty, touching and formidably clever." - The TimesAnita Brookner has written 24 books over the course of 28 years. She published her first novel, A Start in Life, in 1981 and her final one, Strangers, in 2009. She trained as an art historian and worked at the Courtauld Institute of Art until her retirement in 1988. Hotel du Lac won the 1984 Booker Prize. As well as fiction, Anita Brookner has published a number of volumes of art criticism. Lire plus…

Keneally, Thomas Michael

Thomas Keneally’s remarkable, Booker-winning historical fiction about the unlikely hero who rescued thousands of Jews from the Nazi death machine."The remarkable story of a man who saved lives when every sinew of civilization was devoted to destroying them. [It] has the immediacy and the almost unbearable detail of a thousand eyewitnesses who forgot nothing." - New York Times Book ReviewIn 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."A truly heroic story of the war and, like the tree planted in Oskar Schindler's honor in Jerusalem, a fitting memorial to the fight of one individual against the horror of Nazism." — Simon Wiesenthal Thomas Keneally began his writing career in 1964 and has published 33 novels since. His novels include Crimes of the Father, Napoleon’s Last Island, Shame and the Captives, and the New York Times bestselling The Daughters of Mars. His novels The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Gossip from the Forest and Confederates were all shortlisted for the Booker Prize, which he won in 1982 with Schindler’s Ark. He has also... Lire plus…

Desai, Kiran

Kiran Desai won the Man Booker Prize in 2006 for this funny and politically acute family saga about a peaceful retirement under siege from all sides.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."Kiran Desai's extraordinary new novel manages to explore, with intimacy and insight, just about every contemporary international issue: globalization, multiculturalism, economic inequality, fundamentalism and terrorist violence ... Though relieved by much humor, The Inheritance of Loss may strike many readers as offering an unrelentingly bitter view. But then, as Orhan Pamuk wrote soon after 9/11, people in the West are ‘scarcely aware of this overwhelming feeling of humiliation that is experienced by most of the world's population,’ which ‘neither magical realistic novels that endow poverty and foolishness with charm nor the exoticism of popular travel literature manages to fathom.’ This is the invisible emotional reality Desai uncovers as she describes the lives of people fated to experience modern life as a continuous affront to their notions of order, dignity and justice. We do not need to agree with this vision in order to marvel at Desai's artistic power in expressing it." -... Lire plus…

Banville, John

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.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."As Michael Cunningham's The Hours was to Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, so, roughly, is The Sea to [Henry James’] The Turn of the Screw. It is deconstruction and homage at once, an utterly contemporary novel that nonetheless could only have come from a mind steeped in the history of the novel and deeply reflective about what makes fiction still worthwhile ... Max becomes a character in a story of his own making. No longer merely a narrator, he becomes a true author. He resumes control. He gets what he came for. The unsayable is said at last." - Jack Miles, The Los Angeles TimesJohn Banville is the author of more than fifteen novels, a short story collection, and several mysteries written under the pseudonym, Benjamin Black. His novel Ancient Light won the Irish Book Award. In addition to winning The Man Booker Prize 2005, he was also shortlisted for his entire body of work, for The Man Booker International Prize 2007. In 2011,... Lire plus…

Sir Peter Carey, Peter Carey

Review '' My Life as a Fake _ _is so confidently brilliant, so economical yet lively in its writing, so tightly fitted and continuously startling.'' –John Updike, The New Yorker “Ingenious . . . Carey is as diabolical as the hoaxes that his book includes.” — The New York Times ''Brisk, relentlessly prankish. . . . A virtuoso amalgam of styles, simultaneously a literary conundrum of the Borges variety, an exotic adventure tale evocative of both the settings and the narrative methods of Conrad, and a horror story derived from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein .'' –_The New York Times Book Review ''A wholly absorbing, bizarrely madcap comedy and a telling commentary on the sometimes baffling sources of art. . . . Though fiction, the book is anything but fake. It's truth, beauty and comedy wrapped in one sprightly package.'' – Chicago Tribune _ “We have a great novelist living on the planet with us, and his name is Peter Carey.'' _–Los Angeles Times Book Review ''Circling from the real to the imaginary and back is as happily perplexing as a drawing by M.C. Escher. . . . Carey can bring a character to life, give him a voice and a history and a psychological topography, in a single paragraph.'' – The New York Review of Books ''No other Australian writer in our time has succeeded as well as Peter Carey in writing novels that compel the attention of a world-wide audience. His work . . . occupies a high plane of literary brilliance.'' – The Boston Globe “Peter Carey’s new novel... Lire plus…