Beryl Bainbridge explores the British experience of the Crimean War through the adventures - and hidden secrets - of her enigmatic central character
The Booker Prize 1998
Part thriller, part psychological study, part farce, Amsterdam is one of the prize’s most polarising winners. Even Ian McEwan himself admitted it had a ‘rather improbable comic plot’.
According to McEwan, the story – a mixture of love, friendship, politics, media ethics, and euthanasia – grew out of a ‘long-running joke’. Not all critics were in on it and, as the author later noted, the novel’s ‘(as opposed to my) misfortune was to win the Booker Prize, at which point some people began to dismiss it’.
Only some people though. In a sly dig at previous winners’ humblebrags, McEwan promised to spend his winnings ‘on something perfectly useless’ rather than on ‘bus fares and linoleum’.
Amsterdam
Winner of The Booker Prize 1998
- By
- Ian McEwan
- Published by
- Jonathan Cape
A fragile friendship descends into hatred and revenge, in Ian McEwan’s darkly humorous Booker Prize 1998-winning novel
The shortlist
England is replicated in a theme park on the Isle of Wight in Julian Barnes’ satirical postmodern novel, which the author describes as ‘a semi-farce’
Martin Booth’s fictional history of Alexander Bayliss, a British citizen arrested for spying in the Soviet Union in the early 1950s
By Martin Booth
Patrick McCabe combines a poignant rite-of-passage tale with a vivid commentary on the human cost of the political turmoil of Ireland in the 1970s
A fragile friendship descends into hatred and revenge, in Ian McEwan’s darkly humorous Booker Prize 1998-winning novel
By Ian McEwan
After the twin evils of sloth and alcohol lead to a horribly botched job, three fence builders flee South in Magnus Mills’ surreal black comedy
By Magnus Mills
