36 results for "Booker Prize"

The Impostor

Damon Galgut
A gripping tale of guilty secrets, betrayal, and racial tension, of isolation and revenge in modern-day South Africa, from the Man Booker Prize—shortlisted author of The Good Doctor When Adam moves into the abandoned house on the dusty edge of town, he is hoping to recover from the loss of his job and his home in the city. But when he meets Canning — a shadowy figure from his childhood — and Canning’s enigmatic and beautiful wife, a sinister new chapter in his life begins. Canning has inherited a vast fortune and a giant folly in the veld, a magical place of fantasy and dreams that seduces Adam and transforms him absolutely, violently — and perhaps forever. The Impostor evokes a hot and cruel and claustrophobic world, in which sex and death are never far from the surface. Skilfully interweaving the story of one man’s struggle to regain his moral centre with the disorienting, often tragic effects of massive social and political change, it is Galgut’s most powerful and unforgettable novel yet. From the Hardcover edition.
McClelland & Stewart 2009-05-05 256 pages

The Impostor

Damon Galgut
A gripping tale of guilty secrets, betrayal, and racial tension, of isolation and revenge in modern-day South Africa, from the Man Booker Prize—shortlisted author of The Good Doctor When Adam moves into the abandoned house on the dusty edge of town, he is hoping to recover from the loss of his job and his home in the city. But when he meets Canning — a shadowy figure from his childhood — and Canning’s enigmatic and beautiful wife, a sinister new chapter in his life begins. Canning has inherited a vast fortune and a giant folly in the veld, a magical place of fantasy and dreams that seduces Adam and transforms him absolutely, violently — and perhaps forever. The Impostor evokes a hot and cruel and claustrophobic world, in which sex and death are never far from the surface. Skilfully interweaving the story of one man’s struggle to regain his moral centre with the disorienting, often tragic effects of massive social and political change, it is Galgut’s most powerful and unforgettable novel yet.
McClelland & Stewart 2008 249 pages

Live a little

Jacobson, Howard
'A . . . tender love story . . . This book is alive. It pulses with warmth and intelligence' The Times A wickedly observed novel about falling in love at the end of your life, by the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Finkler Question. At the age of ninety-something, Beryl Dusinbery is forgetting everything - including her own children. She spends her days stitching morbid samplers and tormenting her two carers with tangled tales of her husbands and affairs. Shimi Carmelli can do up his own buttons, walks without a frame and speaks without spitting. Among the widows of North London, he's whispered about as the last of the eligible bachelors. He forgets nothing -especially not the shame of a childhood incident that has long hung over him. There's very little left remaining for either of them. . . But perhaps just enough to heal some of the hurt inflicted along the way, and find new meaning in what's left. * SHORTLISTED FOR THE WINGATE LITERARY PRIZE 2020*
Vintage Books 2020-08-06 288 pages

Whatever it is, I don't like it

Jacobson, Howard
It takes a particular kind of man to want an embroidered polo player astride his left nipple. Occasionally, when I am tired and emotional, or consumed with self-dislike, I try to imagine myself as someone else, a wearer of Yarmouth shirts and fleecy sweats, of windbreakers and rugged Tyler shorts, of baseball caps with polo players where the section of the brain that concerns itself with aesthetics is supposed to be. But the hour passes. Good men return from fighting Satan in the wilderness the stronger for their struggle, and so do I. The winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize, Howard Jacobson, brims with life in this collection of his most acclaimed journalism. From the unusual disposal of his father-in-law's ashes and the cultural wasteland of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang to the melancholy sensuality of Leonard Cohen and desolation of Wagner's tragedies, Jacobson writes with all the thunder and joy of a man possessed. Absurdity piles upon absurdity, and glorious sentences weave together to create a hilarious, heartbreaking and uniquely human collection. This book is not just a series of parts, but an irresistible, unputdownable sum which triumphantly out-Thurbers Thurber.
W F Howes 2011 422 pages

The making of Henry

Jacobson, Howard
Man Booker Prize-Winning Author of THE FINKLER QUESTION Swathed in his kimono, drinking tea from his samovar, Henry Nagle is temperamentally opposed to life in the 21st century. Preferring not to contemplate the great intellectual and worldly success of his best boyhood friend, he argues constantly with his father, an upholsterer turned fire-eater-and now dead for many years. When he goes out at all, Henry goes after other men's wives. But when he mysteriously inherits a sumptuous apartment, Henry's life changes, bringing on a slick descendant of Robert Louis Stevenson, an excitable red setter, and a wise-cracking waitress with a taste for danger. All of them demand his attention, even his love, a word which barely exists in Henry's magisterial vocabulary, never mind his heart. From one of England's most highly regarded writers, The Making of Henry" "is a ravishing novel, at once wise, tender and mordantly funny.
ISIS 2005 435 pages

Strangers

Anita Brookner
Booker Prize-winner Anita Brookner captures the magic and depth of real life with this story of an ordinary man whose unexpected longings, doubts, and fears are universal. Paul Sturgis is resigned to his bachelorhood and the quietude of his London flat. He occasionally pays obliging visits to his nearest living relative, Helena, his cousin’s widow. To avoid having to turn down her Christmas invitation, Paul sets off for a holiday in Venice where he meets Mrs. Vicky Gardner, an intriguing woman in the midst of a divorce. Upon his return to England, a former girlfriend, Sarah, reenters Paul’s world and these two women spark a transformation in Paul, culminating in a shocking decision.
National Geographic Books 2010-07-13 256 pages

Things that disappear

Erpenbeck, Jenny
"The bestselling and award-winning German author Jenny Erpenbeck has gained international praise for her novels including Visitation, Kairos, and Go, Went, Gone. Things That Disappear is an exciting collection of interlinked miniature prose pieces that grapple with the phenomenon of disappearance on scales both large and small. The things that disappear in these pages range from everyday objects such as socks and cheese to close friends and the social norms of common courtesy, to sites and objects resonant with East German history, such as the Palace of the Republic or the lines of sight now blocked by new construction in Berlin. Erpenbeck asks: "Is there a perpetrator who makes things that I know and cherish disappear?" These things disap- pear, and yet do they really? Do they remain in our memories more fully than if they continued to exist? Translated beautifully by Kurt Beals, Things That Disappear follows on the heels of Erpenbeck's Booker Prize-winning novel Kairos and offers a window into a renowned writer's sense of the past, and of her own self as a writer"-- Provided by publisher.
New Directions Publishing Corporation 2025-10-07 96 pages

The dog's last walk: (and other pieces)

Jacobson, Howard
"Week after week, for eighteen years, the Booker Prize-winnng novelist Howard Jacobson wrote a weekly column for the Independent, reflecting in inimitable style on the sacred and the profane in turn, the frivoulous and the serious, the deeply personal and the most universal. As the much-loved newspaper ceases printing, this second collection of Jacobson's columns offers a selection of the witty and thunderous best..."--Back cover.
Bloomsbury Publishing, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 2017-07-18 285 pages

When I grow up

Rubens, Bernice
In a rare foray outside that natural home, Booker Prize-winner Bernice Rubens penned these memoirs 'while I still have a memory'. Poignantly, the highly-acclaimed author, literary bon-vivante and celebrated film-maker died shortly after completing them. She wasn't quite expecting that but nor, as she reveals in these pages, did she expect to become a writer. It wasn't the sort of thing that happened to girls born in Glossop Terrace in Splott, the 'unmentionable and indisputable armpit of Cardiff'. In this delightful evocation of her own life, Rubens escorts us, with a flotilla of anecdotes, away from that armpit through her wartime childhood, her first 'major folly' (studying English at University) to stints as a teacher, lady's maid and actress before stumbling upon a career that bemused her until the end of her days. 'What shall I do,' was her constant internal refrain, 'when I grow up?' Bernice Rubens died in the autumn of 2004.
Abacus 2006-12-07 229 pages

Peeping Tom

Jacobson, Howard
Barney Fugleman has two major preoccupations in life: sex and literature. He is obsessed by the life and work of a man hailed by many as a genius of the nineteenth century - and by Barney as a 'prurient little Victorian ratbag'. This curious propulsion drives him out of Finchley, and out of the life he shares with Sharon and her 'rampant marvellings', to Cornwall. There he offends serious ramblers with his slip-on snakeskin shoes, fur coat and antagonism to all things green and growing as he stomps the wild Atlantic cliffs on long, morbid walks, tampering with the truth, tangling with the imperious Camilla - and telling a riotous tale. By the winner of the Man Booker Prize and author of The Finkler Question .
Vintage 1999 266 pages

Far to go

Pick, Alison
Winner of the Helen and Stan Vine Jewish Book Award and finalist for the Man Booker Prize In Far to Go, one of our most accomplished young writers takes us inside the world of an affluent Jewish family in Prague during the lead-up to Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia. In 1939, Pavel and Anneliese Bauer are secular Jews whose lives are turned upside down by the arrival of Hitler. They are unable to leave the country in time to avoid deportation, but they do manage to get their six-year-old son Pepik a place on a Kindertransport. Meanwhile, a fascinating and compelling present-day strand in the story slowly reveals the unexpected fates of each of the Bauers. Through a series of surprising twists, Pick leads us to ask: What does it mean to cling to identity in the face of persecution? And what are the consequences if you attempt to change your identity? Inspired by the harrowing five-year journey Alison Pick's own grandparents embarked upon from their native Czechoslovakia to Canada during the Second World War, Far to Gois an epic historical novel that traces one family's journey through these tumultuous and traumatic events. A layered, beautifully written, moving, and suspenseful story by one of our rising literary stars.
House of Anansi Press 2010-01-01 314 pages

Set on edge

Rubens, Bernice
Product Description Glady's Sperber remains home as one by one her younger brothers and sisters marry and move out, but finally, at sixty, she decides to marry From Publishers Weekly Originally published in England in 1960, this is a bleak rendition of a mother/daughter love/hate relationship by the Booker Prize-winning author (see review of Our Father below). Gladys Sperber, the family "martyr," is the oldest of five "failures" who, because her mother is "too busy," virtually raises her siblings. "She would take her food when the others had eaten. . . . She would wait for their happiness before she felt entitled to her own, and she would have looked after their dying if she'd been able." The title refers to Gladys's destructive symbiotic relationship with her mother: the biblical book of Ezekiel observes that fathers eat sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge. Although the novel, which covers two world wars, evokes the limited choices available to women in a man's world and is replete with manifestations of mother-daughter interdependence (an adult Gladys shares a bedroom with her widowed mother), it doesn't probe the psychodynamics of that relationship. The result is a contrived work that depresses rather than engrosses. Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Hamilton 1987 221 pages

The rehearsals

Sharov, Vladimir
New Jerusalem Monastery, seventeenth-century Moscow. Patriarch Nikon has instructed an itinerant French dramatist to stage the New Testament and hasten the Second Coming. But this will be a strange form of theatre. The actors are untrained, illiterate Russian peasants, and nobody is allowed to play Christ. They are persecuted, arrested, displaced, and ultimately replaced by their own children. Yet the rehearsals continue... A stunning reflection on art, history, religion and national identity, Rehearsals is the seminal work in the unique oeuvre of Vladimir Sharov, Russian Booker Prize winner (2014) and author of Before & During (Read Russia award for best translation, 2015).
Dedalus 2017 359 pages