Shortlists
By Charles Chadwick
A convicted murderer and a woman, shunned for her ugliness, meet by chance on a bus. more
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By Christopher Nicholson
'I asked the sailor what an Elephant looked like; he replied that it was like nothing on earth.' more
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By Adam Thirlwell
Haffner is charming, morally suspect, sexually omnivorous, vain. He is British and Jewish and a widower. But when was Haffner ever really married? Or Jewish? When was he ever attached? more
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By Adam Foulds
Based on real events in Epping Forest on the edge of London around 1840, The Quickening Maze centres on the first incarceration of the great nature poet John Clare. more
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By Georgina Harding
On a freezing January morning in 1961, eight-year-old Anna’s mother disappears into the fog. That same morning, a spy case breaks in the news. more
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By Monique Roffey
When George and Sabine Harwood arrive in Trinidad from England George instantly takes to their new life, but Sabine feels isolated, heat-fatigued, and ill at ease with the racial segregation. more
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By Indra Sinha
Animal’s People, a disturbing, often funny novel, was shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize. The story, set in Khaufpur – Bhopal by another name – is narrated by a foul-mouthed teenaged boy, left more
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By Julia Leigh
Disquiet is a spare, elliptical novel in which a woman returns with her children to her childhood home in rural France. more
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By Eva Hoffman
Illuminations is the story of a talented and privileged concert pianist, whose assumptions about civilization and her place in it are challenged by an affair with a political exile from Chechnya. more
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By Judy Corbalis
All seems calm in Castleton, a small rural town in New Zealand, but its respectability hides guilty secrets and simmering rebellion. more
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By Adam Mars-Jones
Pilcrow is narrated by an articulate, chronically sick boy, who uses language to make his way in, and exercise some control over, a world that his body finds difficult to negotiate. more
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By Panos Karnezis
The Birthday Party is a fable of wickedness punished, which makes something original and vivid out of the almost mythic story of the Onassis family. more
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By Sujit Saraf
The Peacock Throne sets a huge cast of characters against a backdrop of communal violence and political corruption in Old Delhi in the years following the assassination of Indira Ghandi in 1984. more
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By M.J. Hyland
Ireland, 1971, John Egan is a misfit, 'a twelve year old in the body of a grown man with the voice of a giant who insists on the ridiculous truth'. more
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By Will Eaves
Nothing To Be Afraid Of is an excursion in artifice and identity, and follows the lives, loves and sibling rivalry of two sisters, caught up in a production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. more
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By Vikram Chandra
Sacred Games conjures up the modern India of Bollywood and gangsterdom in Mumbai, an exciting city with a violent underbelly. more
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By James Lasdun
Part political thriller, part meditation on the nature of desire and betrayal, Seven Lies tells the story of Stefan Vogel, a young man growing up in the former East Germany, whose yearnings for love more
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By Jon McGregor
So Many Ways To Begin describes a man who feels rootless after discovering, accidentally, at the age of twenty, that he was adopted. more
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By Mary Lawson
The Other Side Of The Bridge is a powerful, heartbreaking story about tempting fate and living with the consequences, set, like Lawson’s magical Crow Lake, in the far north of Canada but with a magni more
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By Tessa Hadley
Four generations of women try to make sense of their lives in a story that spans five decades, from the fifties to the present. more
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By Gerard Woodward
The destructive effect of alcoholism on an ordinary family of the 1970s is explored in a story that encompasses both farce and tragedy. more
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By Nadeem Aslam
Maps for Lost Lovers was eleven years in the making, and is set amongst a Pakistani family in an English town. more
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By Justin Hill
As the Chinese golden age descends into civil war a young girl is orphaned, yet rises to become one of the most celebrated women of her age. more
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By Tabish Khair
A snapshot of a particular part of India is vividly portrayed through a group of people brought together at random by boarding a bus. more
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By Hari Kunzru
The power of technology to change lives is revealed in a heady mix of Bollywood, London and Silicon Valley as an electronic virus is unleashed. more
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By Sid Smith
A gripping, lyrical tale of danger and redemption that uncovers an extraordinary hidden world. more
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By Manju Kapur
Astha has everything an educated, middle-class Delhi woman could ask for - a loving husband and affluent surroundings - and yet is consumed with a sense of dissatisfaction. She begins an extra-marita more
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By Ardashir Vakil
Ben and Priya are your average north London couple: Ben's a teacher and Priya works in the media. Over the course of one vital day they fight, talk, love and gripe, raking over their life together to more
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By Michelle de Kretser
The Hamilton Case is set in Ceylon in the 1930s. The empire is losing its grip and political change is coming. more
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By Julia Darling
When her mother is sent to prison for three months for assaulting a policeman with a stiletto shoe, fifteen-year-old Caris goes gently off the rails. more
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By Francesca Marciano
Casa Rossa, the home of the Strada family, is a magnificent farmhouse standing amidst the olive groves of Puglia. The house is being sold and Alina, the daughter entrusted with packing up, is piecing more
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By Tim Lott
Tragic and hilarious in equal measure, Tim Lott’s story of Charlie and Maureen Buck’s ailing marriage and their climb up (and down) the social ladder during the 1980s is a wonderfully honest portrait more
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By Sarah May
Little remains of the glamour of Setton, once the Noth-East's premier pleasure resort. The Spanish City is boarded up; its famous Charleston roller coaster turning rapidly to rust. Only in Moscadini' more
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By Patricia Tyrell
As a 3-year old child Cate was snatched away from her mother. The book begins with Les, the man who abducted Cate, phoning her mother as he has done for the twelve years since he took her child. more
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By Jeremy Gavron
The Book of Israel portrays over 100 years of Jewish history as the name Israel is handed down through the generations of one family. more
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By Mick Jackson
A Westcountry village in the 1940s has its little routines and rituals shattered by a series of unexpected arrivals. more
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By Ali Smith
Hotel World was shortlisted both for the Booker Prize 2001 and for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2001. more
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By Niall Griffiths
Robbed of his ancestral home - a near-derelict hovel in the mountains of west Wales - Ianto pledges revenge not only on the English yuppies who have turned his grandmother's cottage into a weekenders more
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By Ross Gilfillan
London, 1851. Among the teeming crowds visiting the Great Exhibition is the newspaper columnist Henry Hilditch, whose sensational exposes of the lives and deprivations of the working class are the ta more
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By Tobias Hill
An epic story spanning two continents and six centuries, The Love of Stones follows three very different people, each in their own way consumed by a desire that borders on obsession. more
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By Mark Behr
Embrace is the story of the awakening of Karl De Man a thirteen-year-old student at the Berg, an exclusive academy for boys in South Africa in the 1970s. more
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By John Lanchester
One warm July morning Mr Phillips climbs out of bed, leaving Mrs Phillips dozing. He prepares for his commute into the city - but this is no ordinary Wednesday. It is a day on which Mr Phillips will more
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By Anne Enright
What Are You Like? is a classic tale of twins, separated at birth and haunted by the missing part of themselves. more
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By Linda Grant
In 1946 Tel Aviv was the world’s most modern place, the epicentre of a seething progressive world of socialists, Zionists, artists, and anyone with a past they wanted to forget. more
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Shortlist is not available for this year.
By Derek Beaven
Acts of Mutiny defies categories for David Robson of the Sunday Telegraph who described it as ‘part thriller, part love story, part elegy for lost innocence’. more
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By Andrew Miller
The most famous seducer of all time attempts to reinvent himself in Andrew Miller’s Casanova. The most famous seducer of all time attempts to reinvent himself in Andrew Miller’s Casanova. The most fa more
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By Sebastian Barry
The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty was written ten years after the author’s first book, and tells a tale of a Sligoman constantly in flight, but unable to forget the pull of home. more
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By Christina Koning
Venezuela, 1953. The war is over and, all over the world, the old certainties are collapsing, as people start to rebuild lives damaged by the conflict. more
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Shortlist is not available for this year.
Shortlist is not available for this year.
Shortlist is not available for this year.
Shortlist is not available for this year.
Shortlist is not available for this year.
Shortlist is not available for this year.
Shortlist is not available for this year.
Shortlist is not available for this year.
Shortlist is not available for this year.