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This grouping of two short stories, a short novel within a prologue and an epilogue from Naipaul's travel journals, is held together by Naipaul's pervading concern with the themes of exile, freedom and prejudice.

John Berger's 1972 erotic novel tells the story of an adventurous young man, his tumultuous life, and especially his many-faceted romantic adventures, in the midst of the chaos of early 20th-century Italy. Berger won the Booker Prize for this novel, and stirred up controversy when he used his acceptance speech to denounce the Booker organization for their historical colonialism in the West Indies and donated one-half his prize money to the Black Panthers. It was after this event that Berger moved permanently from his native England to the French Alps, where he has lived ever since in a peasant village, writing and farming.

Winner of the 1974 Booker-McConnel Prize for Fiction, Gordimer's novel is about a self-professed "conservationist" in South Africa, a wealthy, middle-aged, sexually voracious industrialist and landowner who lives the good life and seeks at all costs to preserve it, and about the guilt and alienation he comes to feel regarding the poor blacks who work for him.

Olivia Rivers, first wife of colonial officer Douglas Rivers, is the central character in this book which is narrated by Anne, the granddaughter of Douglas Rivers by his second wife. In 1923, Olivia Rivers travels to India to join Douglas at his post, but she has difficulty adjusting because the British maintain such a distance from the Indians. Olivia finds a local man, Nawab, more interesting than British colonial society, and eventually she develops an affair with him. In a parallel story, the narrator also becomes enamored on an Indian man, her landlord Inder Lal. Written after Jhabvala had begun her film collaborations with Merchant/Ivory, the book contains 23 sections, juxtaposing certain scenes together in the manner of a film. The book won the 1975 Booker Prize.

This novel, which won the Booker Prize in 1977, is a coda to "The Raj Quartet". It is set in the new India of 1972, where an elderly couple--Colonel Tusker Smalley and his wife Lucy (minor characters in the "Quartet"--have remained to live out their lives in Pankot, the former military station. Tusker's death prompts Lucy to remember and reveal the ironies and melancholy of their uncommunicative marriage.

Charles, a retired theatre director, retires to a small village where he encounters Hartley, the woman he loved years ago when they were both children, and who is now happily married to a man Charles despises.

OFFSHORE is a love story set among a community of barge-dwellers on the Thames, where Fitzgerald herself lived with her family in the 1960s. The novel won the Booker Prize in 1979. THE GATE OF ANGELS, also known as THE BLUE FLOWER, tells the story of an idealistic man who is the lover and mentor of a 12-year-old girl with whom he is obsessed. Upon her death three years later, she becomes his muse. This novel is based on the life of the German romantic poet Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772-1801), whose major work was a novel describing the artist's search for a "blue flower."

In the early 1800s, Edmund Talbot, a young and rather priggish Englishman, takes passage on a boat heading for Australia where he is to be an official in the colonial government. In addition to Talbot, many of the eccentric passengers--a sexually predatory sailor, the aging coquette Miss Zenobia Brocklebank, the ship's tyrannical captain--undergo profound changes in the course of the voyage, during which a naive clergyman is victimized and, finally, pushed to suicide. These events are described in the diary Talbot keeps en route. "Rites of Passage" won the Booker McConnell prize in 1980.

Considered Salman Rushdie's masterpiece, MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN has become a part of the literary canon, drawing comparisons to ARABIAN NIGHTS for its multi-layered narrative, to Joyce's ULYSSES for its literary and linguistic inventiveness, to Marquez's ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE for its lush magical-realism, and Gunter Grass's THE TIN DRUM, for its ability to capture the history and zeitgeist of a nation. The novel is narrated by Saleem Sinai, a child born at the exact moment India gained independence in 1947, who discovers he has the telepathic ability to hear the thoughts of the one thousand and one other children born within the first hour of India's independence: the other "midnight's children." Mixing historical events and figures with witches, prophecy, and magic, the novel acts as an allegory for India's turbulent history, a coming-of-age tale, and an epic family saga. Hailed by TIME magazine as one of the hundred greatest novels in the English language, MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN won the Booker prize in 1981, and also won the "Best of the Booker" prize in both 1993 and 2008, proving its lasting power.

Based on a true incident, this is the story of Oscar Schindler, a German industrialist who saved over 1000 Jews from the Nazis. Keneally's account is taken from the testimonies of dozens of Holocaust survivors.

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; for meaningful connections to the world in which we live; and for purity of vision. THE LIFE & TIMES OF MICHAEL K. won the Booker prize in 1983.

Recounts the holiday of Edith Hope, meek, unmarried, and thirty-nine, who, on the mend from a disastrous love affair, becomes intimately involved with her fellow guests at the Swiss Hotel du Lac.

Turned down by nearly every major New Zealand publishing house, THE BONE PEOPLE finally was published by a small feminist collective, and went on to win the 1985 Man Booker prize. The novel, with deals simultaneously with both personal and cultural trauma, focuses on Kerewin, an isolated, artistically paralyzed painter; Simon, a mute six-year-old with a penchant for larceny; and Joe, his abusive adoptive father. In one violence-filled night, all three character betray one other, with Joe beating Simon and Simon stabbing Joe. However, through a complicated and surreal process of catharsis, the three find a path towards healing. Using a mixture of Maori mythology and Christian symbolism, Keri Hulme has created a richly textured and lyrical tale of violence and redemption.

Winner of the Booker in 1986, THE OLD DEVILS is considered by many (including Martin Amis) to be Kingsley Amis's masterpiece, a viciously funny, and surprisingly heartfelt portrait of a group of witty and besotted old men and their wives living in Wales. The plot kicks off with the return of Alun Weaver, a washed-up novelist and incorrigible womanizer, and his still-beautiful wife Rhiannon. Alun sets about trying to seduce the wives of his old friends while the husbands find they are still infatuated with Rhiannon. In a typical Amis novel, Alun's acerbic personality would dominate the story, but partway through the narrative Alun drops dead (choking on his whiskey) and the rest of the "Old Devils" are left to make sense of his life, and of theirs.

Claudia Hampton has lived a full life as historian, reporter, lover, mother. Now she is dying in a London hospital, where she remembers the events in her life, particularly a romance with a tank commander during World War II, a passion that defined much of the rest of her life. This novel won the Booker Prize the year it was published.

This whimsical novel, winner of the 1988 Booker Prize, is set in Victorian England and Australia, is the story of two highly unusual people: Oscar Hopkins, rebellious son of a disciplinarian preacher, and Lucinda Leplastrier, an heiress who has just bought a glass factory. The two meet on shipboard, fall in love, and find that they share an attraction for gambling and for risks--a taste that culminates in the precarious conveyance of a crystal church across the rough Australian outback. The novel was made into a major motion picture in 1997 starring Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett.

Kazuo Ishiguro's subtly observed third novel (1989) tells the story of a butler named Stevens. Over the years, as Stevens has perfected the art of self-effacement and complete submission to the needs of Lord Darlington, his aristocratic employer, he has managed to ignore the fact that Darlington was a prominent Nazi sympathizer. Now, in the rapidly changing world of post-World War II England in which the class system is in decline and Stevens has outlived his usefulness, he begins to understand that his obtuseness has blinded him not only to the real nature of his employer but (as he prepares for an unprecedented visit to Mrs. Kenton, the now retired housekeeper) to the workings of his own heart. The overarching themes of the novel are those that Ishiguro has grappled with in many of his books: self-deception, the past's influence on the present, and the essential loneliness of struggling humanity. THE REMAINS OF THE DAY won the Booker Prize and was made into a well-received film directed by Ang Lee and starring Anthony Hopkins as the repressed and lonely Stevens.

Maud Bailey is a scholar researching the life and work of her distant relative, a little known 19th-century poet named Christabel LaMotte. Roland Mitchell is looking into an obscure moment in the life of another Victorian poet, the celebrated Randolph Henry Ash. Together, the two uncover a dark secret in Ash's life: though apparently happily married, he conducted a torrid affair with LaMotte that has never before come to light. As Maud and Roland dig into the facts, they also find themselves falling in love. A.S. Byatt cleverly evokes the world of the Victorians, juxtaposing it to the dryer, less passionate lives of her modern-day protagonists. She also has created extremely convincing letters and love poetry, ostensibly by each of the poets. As the truth about the past emerges, it also illuminates the present--and changes it radically.

Azaro, a spirit child, is born in a small African village and makes the surprising decision to stay alive rather than return to this sprit world home. He alone can see the invisible witches, demons, and monsters that pray upon the living, but perhaps more terrifying are the horrors of the real world: hunger, poverty, political strongmen, greedy landlords, and corrupt British colonials. A mythic, hallucinatory, and epic tale, THE FAMISHED ROAD uses a magic-realism and delicious poetry to conjure the desperate struggle of Africa's disenfranchised. Nigerian poet Ben Okri's novel won the Man Booker in 1991.

A novel about four people in an Italian villa at the end of World War II: Hana the nurse, Caravaggio the thief, Kip the Sikh, and the horribly burned English patient whose memories of love take the narrative back to the 1930s, and a different world.

In Roddy Doyle's novel witty and poignant novel of working-class life in Dublin, 10-year-old Paddy copes with his parents' fights, his earthy neighborhood, and the trials of his little brother Sinbad. PADDY CLARKE HA HA HA was the winner of the Booker Prize in 1993.

In the closing months of World War I, Dr. William Rivers is treating shell-shocked soldiers at Craiglockhart Hospital, only to send them back to the trenches to be slaughtered. Among these men are Billy Pryor, an officer originally from the working class, who returns to the front with his friend, the poet Wilfrid Owen. Meanwhile, Rivers himself becomes ill with influenza during the epidemic and returns in memory to a South Pacific tribe he once studied, seeing connections between those days and the present time, with its senseless battles and meaningless, blind patriotism. Winner of the Booker Prize in 1995.

A pair of twins in Kerala, India--Rahel and her brother, Estha--struggle to maintain a life in the midst of the wreckage of their family. Winner of the Booker Prize in 1997.

Molly, the wife of a publisher, sinks swiftly and unexpectedly into madness and death. Two of her ex-lovers meet at her funeral. One is a famous composer working on his chef d'oeuvre, the other is an editor who has just realized he'll do anything to increase circulation at his newspaper. The two of them, horrified by what has happened, swear that they will help each other die if such a fate ever befalls them. Then each is faced with a moral crisis--a situation that involves yet another of Molly's old flames. In the course of the plot, their true natures are revealed, and the dénouement, set in Amsterdam, is both farcical and fitting. McEwan's seventh novel was the winner of the Booker Prize in 1998.

In South Africa after apartheid, a middle-aged professor of Romantic poetry sees his career crumble as the world turns more to technology than to literature. After a series of ever more degrading misadventures, including a charge of sexual harassment, he ends up on his daughter's farm. There, after further disgraces--his daughter is raped and he is attacked and disfigured--he is able to reconcile himself to his stunted life by caring for animals and, finally, feeling a kind of kinship with them. DISGRACE won the Booker Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999.

In her 10th novel, Margaret Atwood creates an elderly woman named Iris Griffen, who looks back on her life life of privilege and wealth in Ontario, Canada. Alongside Iris's story, we read a bizarrely futuristic novel about obsession, written by her sister Laura, who seems to have committed suicide in 1945. The two stories are enhanced by newspaper accounts about these two women and their families over half a century, and by a stunningly unexpected ending.

Peter Carey tells the story of Australia's most famous outlaw, Ned Kelly, who was executed as a murderer and a horse thief in 1880. The facts of Kelly's brief life are revealed in a series of letters, very much in his own quirky vernacular voice, that he writes to the baby daughter he never sees. What is clear from Peter Carey's account is that poverty, hardship, and the prejudice of the English police force toward the Irish are all part of the plight of Ned Kelly--a good boy gone wrong who became a national hero. THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG was a New York Times "Editor's Choice" for 2001.

Pi, the precocious animal-loving son of an Indian zookeeper, loses his family in a shipwreck en route to North America--and is left alone in a lifeboat with a man-eating Bengal tiger named Richard Parker, with whom he manages (thanks to his zoo background) to strike up an ingenious truce. When they finally reach land and the tiger disappears, Pi finds that no one will believe his story--and so he creates an alternative tale, one that is false but sounds true. This whimsical fantasy was short-listed for Canada's Governor General's Literary Award and won the Booker Prize in 2002. Also a New York Times Notable Book for 2002.

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