The Booker Prize 2023 shortlist is out and includes The Bee Sting, Western Lane, Prophet Song, This Other Eden, If I Survive You and Study For Obedience. But have you read any of the winners from the previous 6 years? Can you even remember what they were? Well here they are and we have them in stock on our website!
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
Last year’s winner is a magical realism whodunnit set amid Sri Lanka’s civil war.
Colombo, 1990. Maali Almeida, war photographer, gambler and closet gay, has woken up dead in what seems like a celestial visa office.
His dismembered body is sinking in the serene Beira lake and he has no idea who killed him. At a time where scores are settled by death squads, suicide bombers and hired goons, the list of suspects is depressingly long, as the ghouls and ghosts with grudges who cluster round can attest.
But even in the afterlife, time is running out for Maali. He has seven moons to try and contact the man and woman he loves most and lead them to a hidden cache of photos that will rock Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka’s foremost author delivers a rip-roaring epic, full of mordant wit and disturbing truths.
Winner of The Booker Prize 2021 is a story of one family. One promise. One chance to tell a new story.
On a farm outside Pretoria, the Swarts are gathering for Ma’s funeral.
The younger generation, Anton and Amor, detest everything the family stand for – not least their treatment of the Black woman who has worked for them her whole life.
Salome was to be given her own house, her own land…yet somehow, that vow is carefully ignored.
As each decade passes, and the family assemble again, one question hovers over them.
Can you ever escape the repercussions of a broken promise?
Douglas Stuart’s debut novel and winner in 2020 is an intimate, compassionate, gripping portrait of addiction, courage and love.
It is 1981. Glasgow is dying and good families must grift to survive.
Agnes Bain has always expected more from life, dreaming of greater things.
But Agnes is abandoned by her philandering husband, and as she descends deeper into drink, the children try their best to save her, yet one by one they must abandon her to save themselves.
It is her son Shuggie who holds out hope the longest. Shuggie is different, he is clearly no’ right.
But Shuggie believes that if he tries his hardest, he can be normal like the other boys and help his mother escape this hopeless place.
Bernardine Evaristo’s interwoven stories of identity, race, womanhood, and the realities of modern Britain won her the Booker Prize in 2019 (shared that year with Margaret Atwood).
This is Britain as you’ve never read it.
This is Britain as it has never been told.
From Newcastle to Cornwall, from the birth of the twentieth century to the teens of the twenty-first, Girl, Woman, Other follows a cast of twelve characters on their personal journeys through this country and the last hundred years.
They’re each looking for something – a shared past, an unexpected future, a place to call home, somewhere to fit in, a lover, a missed mother, a lost father, even just a touch of hope . . .
Sharing the prize in 2019 was Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale.
When the van door slammed on Offred’s future at the end of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,’ readers had no way of telling what lay ahead. With ‘The Testaments,’ the wait is over.
Margaret Atwood’s sequel picks up the story 15 years after Offred stepped into the unknown, with the explosive testaments of three female narrators from Gilead.
What happened to Offred?
The Republic of Gilead is beginning to rot from within. At this crucial moment, two girls with radically different experiences of the regime come face to face with the legendary, ruthless Aunt Lydia. But how far will each go for what she believes?
Anna Burn’s funny and compelling novel was the winner in 2018.
In an unnamed city, where to be interesting is dangerous, an eighteen-year-old woman has attracted the unwanted and unavoidable attention of a powerful and frightening older man.
‘Milkman’.
In this community, where suggestions quickly become fact, where gossip and hearsay can lead to terrible consequences, what can she do to stop a rumour once it has started?
Milkman is persistent, the word is spreading, and she is no longer in control . . .
In 2017 the American Civil War was the setting for the Booker winner with George Saunder’s masterpiece.
The American Civil War rages while President Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son lies gravely ill. In a matter of days, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returns to the crypt several times alone to hold his boy’s body.
From this seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins an unforgettable story of familial love and loss that breaks free of realism, entering a thrilling, supernatural domain both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself trapped in a transitional realm – called, in Tibetan tradition, the bardo – and as ghosts mingle, squabble, gripe and commiserate, and stony tendrils creep towards the boy, a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie’s soul.