2006

Kiran Desai. The Inheritance of Loss

In the northeastern Himalayas a rising insurgency in Nepal challenges the old way of life--and opens up a grasping world of conflicting desires.

2005

John Banville. The Sea

The narrator is Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who, soon after his wife's death, has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child - a retreat from the grief, anger, and numbness of his life without her. But it is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled vacationing family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time.

2004

Alan Hollinghurst. The Line of Beauty

In the summer of 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby-whom Nick had idolized at Oxford-and Catherine, highly critical of her family's assumptions and ambitions. As the boom years of the eighties unfold, Nick, an innocent in the world of politics and money, finds his life altered by the rising fortunes of this glamorous family.

2003

DBC Pierre. Vernon God Little

In the town jail of Martirio, Texas--under the terrifying care of the dynastic Gurie family, and wearing only his New Jack trainers and underpants--15-year-old Vernon Little is in trouble. His friend, the mysterious Jesus, has just blown away 16 of his classmates before turning the gun on himself.

2002

Yann Martel. Life of Pi

This brilliant fabulist novel combines the delight of Kipling's "Just So Stories" with the metaphysical adventure of "Jonah and the Whale, " as Pi, the son of a zookeeper, is marooned aboard a lifeboat with a hyena, a wounded zebra, an orangutan, and a tiger.

2001

Peter Carey. True History of the Kelly Gang

Speaking from the grave, out of 19th century Australia rides a hero of his people--Ned Kelly--a mythic outlaw whose life embodies tragedy, perseverance, and freedom. Executed more than a century ago, he resonates still as that country's most potent legend.

2000

Margaret Atwood. The Blind Assassin

Containing a novel within a novel, "The Blind Assassin" is a science fiction story told by two unnamed lovers who meet in dingy backstreet rooms. Told in a style that magnificently captures the colloquialisms of the 1930s and 1940s, it unfolds layer by astonishing layer and concludes in a brilliant and wonderfully satisfying twist.

1999

J.M. Coetzee. Disgrace

Set in post-apartheid Cape Town, Professor David Laurie attempts to relate to his daughter, Lucy, and to a society with new racial complexities. But that is disrupted by an afternoon of violence that changes him and his daughter in ways he could never have foreseen.

1998

Ian McEwan. Amsterdam

On a chilly February day, two old friends meet in the throng outside a crematorium to pay their last respects to the woman who had been a lover to both of them. In the days that follow the funeral, Clive and Vernon will make a pact that will have consequences that neither man could have foreseen.

1997

Arundhati Roy. The God of Small Things

A richly textured first book about the tragic decline of one family whose members suffer the terrible consequences of forbidden love.

1996

Graham Swift. Last Orders

A subtle yet piercing story about the ways in which friendship and love are shaped by the past and by fate. At its center is a group of men, friends since the Second World War, whose lives revolve around work, family, the racetrack, and their favorite pub. When one of the group dies, the survivors are compelled to take stock.

1995

Pat Barker. The Ghost Road

The culmination of Barker's WWI trilogy that began with Regeneration and The Eye in the Door.  The trilogy follows William Rivers, a psychologist who pioneered the treatment of shell shock, and some of his patients, who include such real-life figures as poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, as well as the fictional Lieutenant Billy Prior, a bisexual whose life as an officer is complicated by his working-class origins.

1994

James Kelman. How Late It Was, How Late

1993

Roddy Doyle. Paddy Clark Ha Ha Ha

Paddy Clarke is ten years old. He lives with his ma and da, his younger brother Sinbad, and two baby sisters in the Dublin working-class neighborhood of Barrytown. Paddy spends his days with his friends Kevin, Aiden, and Liam, roaming local construction sites, writing their names in wet cement, conducting Viking funerals for dead rats, and torturing Sinbad.

1992

Michael Ondaatje. The English Patient

With ravishing beauty and unsettling intelligence, Michael Ondaatje traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. Hana, the exhausted nurse; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burned man who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal, and rescue illuminate this book like flashes of heat lightning.

1991

Ben Okri. The Famished Road

The narrator, Azaro, is a spirit child who maintains his ties to the supernatural world. Possessed by "boiling hallucinations, '' he can see the invisible, grotesque demons and witches who prey on his family and neighbors in an African ghetto community.

1990

A.S. Byatt. Possession

As a pair of young scholars research the lives of two Victorian poets, they uncover their letters, journals, and poems, and track their movements from London to Yorkshire-- from spiritualist séances to the fairy-haunted far west of Brittany. What emerges is an extraordinary counterpoint of passion and ideas.

1989

Kazuo Ishiguro. The Remains of the Day

A compelling portrait of the perfect English butler, who, at the end of his career in postwar England, reviews his life and secretly questions the "greatness" of the nobleman he served.

1988

Peter Carey. Oscar and Lucinda

A romance of the kind that could only take place in 19th-century Australia. For only on that sprawling continent could a nervous Anglican minister who gambles with a system provided by God become allied with a teenaged heiress who buys a glassworks to better her sex life. The two of them, Oscar and Lucinda, end up in a half-mad expedition to transport a glass church across the Outback.

1987

Penelope Lively. Moon Tiger

Claudia Hampton, an unconventional historian and former war correspondent lies in a hospital bed dying of cancer. Forced inward, Claudia moves randomly across time and place to reconstruct the strata of her life. But "most lives have their core, their kernel, the vital centre''; Claudia's is the brief, tragic encounter she had in Egypt during the war with Tom Southern, a British tank officer on leave from battle.

1986

Kingsley Amis. The Old Devils

"The Old Devils'' are aged drinking partners whose number is enlarged and enlivened when poet Alun Weaver and his wife Rhiannon return to Wales. Alun is a letch and Rhiannon still a beauty. Like pebbles dropped into a still pond, the Weavers set off a series of emotional waves that are still breaking at novel's end.

1985

Keri Hulme. The Bone People

A mystery, a love story, and an ambitious exploration of the zone where Maori and European New Zealand meet, clash, and sometimes merge.

1984

Anita Brookner. Hotel du Lac

Edith Hope writes romance novels under a psudonym. 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 resore 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.

1983

J.M. Coetzee. Life and Times of Michael K.

Set during a fictional civil war in South Africa, this book is symbolic that apartheid created in the lives of those so brutally affected by its implementation.

1982

Thomas Keneally. Schindler's List

The compelling story of Oskar Schindle, a Nazi Party member, whose heroic actions during WWII saved the lives of countless Jews.

1981

Salman Rushdie. Midnight's Children

A fascinating family saga about the birth and maturity of a land and its people - a brilliant incarnation of the human comedy.

1980

William Golding. Rites of Passage

The journal of aristocratic Edmund Talbot of his journey from England to Australia in the 19th century.

1979

Penelope Fitzgerald. Offshore

On the Battersea Reach of the Thames, a mixed bag of eccentrics lives in houseboats. Belonging to neither land nor sea, they belong to one another. How each of their lives complicates the others is the stuff of this perfect little novel.

1978

Iris Murdoch. The Sea, the Sea

Charles Arrowby, leading light of England's theatrical set, retires from glittering London to an isolated home by the sea. He plans to write a memoir about his great love affair with Clement Makin, his mentor, both professionally and personally, and amuse himself with Lizzie, an actress he has strung along for many years. None of his plans work out, and his memoir evolves into a riveting chronicle of the strange events and unexpected visitors-some real, some spectral-that disrupt his world and shake his oversized ego to its very core.

1977

Paul Scott. Staying On

It is 1972, long after the British have left the hills of Pankot. Hanging on are Colonel Tusher Smalley, faced with a dwindling supply of rupees and loss of his way of life. With him is his nostalgic wife Lucy, living on memories, Hollywood movies and her will to keep her husband alive. Pitted against them is Mrs. Bhoolabhoy, their landlady, who wages a bitter domestic war against her tenants. In the end this conflict gives Tusher and Lucy something to rally around -- something that strengthens their love for for each other

1976

David Storey. Saville

In the 1940s, a coal miner's son goes to grammar school on a scholarship, escaping the poverty of his upbringing.  Upon graduation, he finds himself estranged from his family and community and struggles to find meaning in his life.

1975

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Heat and Dust

Set in colonial India during the 1920s, Heat and Dust tells the story of Olivia, a beautiful woman suffocated by the propriety and social constraints of her position as the wife of an important English civil servant. Longing for passion and independence, Olivia is drawn into the spell of the Nawab, a minor Indian prince deeply involved in gang raids and criminal plots.

1974

Nadine Gordimer. The Conservationist

A fascinating portrait of a "conservationist" left only with the possibility of self-preservation, a subtle and detailed study of the forces and relationships that seethe in South Africa today.

 

1974

Stanley Middleton. Holiday

1973

J.G. Farrell. The Siege of Krishnapur

1972

John Berger. G

1971

V.S. Naipaul. In a Free State

1970

Bernice Rubens. The Elected Member

1969

P.H. Newby. Something to Answer For