13 of the best page-turners from the Booker Library
Think that a prize-winning novel can’t also be utterly compelling? These gripping titles from the Booker Prize archives will keep you on the edge of your seat
Staff picks: our favourite Booker Prize-winning books
As we prepare for the 2026 season, the team at the Booker Prizes reflects on their favourite winners from years gone by
The Gathering by Anne Enright, winner of the Booker Prize 2012
The Gathering stands out for its relentless and unblinking intimacy. Anne Enright takes the familiar tropes of a sprawling, dysfunction Irish family saga and strips away predictability and sentimentality. She delivers what she calls, ‘the intellectual equivalent of a Hollywood weepie’, and what the Booker Prize judges called a ‘powerful, uncomfortable, and unflinching’ read. The novel is entirely narrated through the disconsolate and raw voice of Veronica Hegarty. It’s a tale of how trauma can warp memory and fester across generations. The Gathering trades plot lines for a fierce, poetic investigation of grief and blood ties. I’m a reader that appreciates a sharp, wry eye and precise narration, so this hauntingly beautiful family epic remains a firm Booker favourite. And I’ve loved Enright’s writing ever since.
Grace Sansom, Digital Content Executive
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The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, winner of the Booker Prize 1997
Like a parent would say, you can’t have favourites. But that is a lie, and The God of Small Things will always be my golden child. Told largely through the eyes of twins Estha and Rahel, the novel captures childhood as a state of overwhelming sensation: the smells, textures, fears and joys that adults learn to filter out. Arundhati Roy renders it all so vividly that it reminds you how confusing and luminous the world seemed when you were young.
The God of Small Things also introduced me to Arundhati Roy, and I’m not sure I could live without her now. Her 2025 memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me lets us into the world that shaped the novel, and reading it feels like revisiting The God of Small Things from the eyes of an adult who finally understands what they were looking at.
P.S. Some scenes will leave you shocked, horrified, and in awe. Just prepare for an emotional and sensory rollercoaster.
Jasmin Joannou, Digital Marketing Executive
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The Bone People by Keri Hulme, winner of the Booker Prize 1985
Keri Hulme’s only completed novel is a melancholy, often disturbing, story of three outsiders who find each other in a complex society found within the rugged, spiritual land of New Zealand’s South Island. There are troubling themes throughout, including acute alcoholism and repeated violence against a child, which made this a controversial winner in 1985.
The story tells the secretive, and often solitary, lives of Kerewin, Joe and Simon, slowly revealing their histories, as they form an unlikely, dysfunctional and dependent but undoubtedly loving family. Their lives frequently spiral out of control in alarmingly predictable ways, but Hulme somehow reconciles this into a beautiful story of resilience, hope, redemption and love.
The Bone People is a story that stayed with me for a long time.
Rob Smith, COO
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Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee, winner of the Booker Prize 1999
I can’t remember why I was ever drawn to a book as bleak as Disgrace. A middle-aged South African university professor is exiled to live on a remote farm with his daughter after his predatory behaviour finally catches up with him. The protagonist, David Lurie, embodies the worst aspects of white male privilege, although there are men in the book who act in even more heinous ways. All of this is set against the shifting power dynamics of post-Apartheid South Africa, in which men like Lurie are finally facing an almighty reckoning, and where hope is in short supply. It’s dark and unsentimental stuff, and in another writer’s hands the reader could be left feeling utterly miserable. And yet, Coetzee’s mastery of economical language, the perfection of the novel’s construction, the images it conjures and the questions it leaves unanswered make this the Booker winner that has stayed with me more than any other.
Paul Davies, Director of Content
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The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes, winner of the Booker Prize 2011
My favourite kind of books are those that feel quiet and like not much is happening but, actually, so much is happening – and I think this is one of the best. It starts with Tony, older and comfortably retired, revisiting events from his teenage days. He tells us about his college friends: a precocious, arrogant group of boys destined for the fancier universities, who are preoccupied with philosophical arguments and, of course, girls. Decades later, an unexpected letter announces that one of Tony’s school friend’s diary has been left to him via a will. This sets off Tony’s reminiscing and the slow-burn realisation that his version of their schooldays doesn’t present the full picture. I love this book; it’s a look at ageing, memory and personal mythologies, intense and meditative at the same time – and short enough that you can finish it in one sitting.
Indira Birnie, Head of Digital Marketing
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The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of the Booker Prize 1989
If one of the key requirements of a Booker Prize-winning book is timelessness, then Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1989 winner The Remains of the Day, at least in 2024, stands as one of the most enduringly resonant – and personally affecting – of them all. We might today recognise in Stevens the butler the role of the enabler, a morally disinterested participant in the abuse of power of those individuals with extreme and dangerous intentions. In Ishiguro’s narrative, Stevens’ reckoning with his past actions while employed by Nazi appeaser Lord Darlington in the build-up to and throughout World War Two, is in turn self-aggrandising, confused, but never contrite, never morally decisive. Yet like many contemporary enablers, his actions have placed him on the wrong side of history, a ruling that does not apply to Ishiguro’s captivating novel.
Jonathan Davenport, Head of Video
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Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle, winner of the Booker Prize 1993
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha is 282 pages long, but each of those flies by. Paddy, the narrator, is a 10-year-old boy, and the story unfolds through his eyes. Doyle’s novel is full of fast-paced dialogue, jumping from school days to long weekends. We grow with him as he makes dens under tables, trucks through muddy fields with friends and smokes his first cigarette. Paddy slowly begins to understand the very adult things happening around him, and we watch him teeter between childhood and adolescence. As he tries to make sense of the uglier things in this world, I found myself reading with my heart in my mouth – yet finishing with a little bit of hope.
Zoe Sanders, Executive Assistant
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The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst, winner of the Booker Prize 2004
What I love about this story is the total escapism it provides. I didn’t get my degree at Oxford, I’m not a young gay man and I was still in primary school in the crazy days of 1980s London, yet this book totally absorbed me into the world of Nick Guest and the fabulously wealthy and connected Fedden family. It’s a great book for making you feel envious of a world of politics, power and parties but as the story progresses the lies, trauma and general nastiness make you glad that it’s a world you’re only temporarily inhabiting as the slightly voyeuristic reader. The Line of Beauty still feels painfully contemporary, in that nothing much has changed in that world – certainly not for the better.
Sinéad Sillars, Digital Producer
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Milkman by Anna Burns, winner of the Booker Prize 2018
In 2018, when Anna Burns won the Booker Prize for Milkman, headlines unfairly labelled the novel everything from ‘odd’ to ‘difficult’. True, Burns’s style doesn’t pander to convention – layered with run-on sentences and nameless characters – but her bold approach instead allows for a refreshing glimpse into a world where every glance and gesture carries profound weight. Set amid the claustrophobia of 1970s Northern Ireland with the Troubles looming in the background, Milkman’s 18-year-old narrator (known only as middle sister) navigates her days with a head-down attitude, even as an influential paramilitary figure takes a disturbing interest in her. Her quiet defiance of the hearsay and social pressure from the tight-knit community around her is utterly magnetic, much like the ‘reading-while-walking’ habit (book lovers, can we relate?) that singles her out. Though the violence of the era is ever-present, Burns’s focus here is far more nuanced as she explores identity, misogyny, power, and agency; all with middle sister’s dark humour and razor-sharp wit. I tore through this book, captivated by one of literature’s most original voices, and you should too.
Donna Mackay-Smith, Deputy Head of Editorial
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