How to read more, according to the Booker Prize 2024 judges
We asked this year’s judges, who have read over 150 books submitted for the prize, to share their tips for fitting more fiction into a busy schedule
Editors’ picks: our favourite Booker Prize-winning books
With the 2024 prize ceremony just around the corner, the team at the Booker Prizes reflects on their favourite winners from years gone by
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, winner of the Booker Prize 2017
An anarchic, grotesque, bawdy, foul-mouthed, tender, grief-stricken, hopeful, human novel, set within a graveyard. George Saunders’ 2017 Booker Prize-winning novel boasts a cast of hundreds – almost all of whom are dead. Lincoln in the Bardo is set in the days following the death of Abraham Lincoln’s son, Willie, and focuses on the grief-stricken President’s visits to the crypt to hold his deceased child’s body. The cast themselves are in various states of awareness and denial about their relationship to life and death – my favourite reaction coming from the inimitable Betsy Baron as she shrieks to her partner ‘Eddie, we’re fucking dead, Eddie. Love you, you fucking fucker’.
Sarah Rogers, Finance and Operations Director
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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, Head of editorial
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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, Senior audience and social manager
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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, Executive producer
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Possession by A.S. Byatt, winner of the Booker Prize 1990
A.S. Byatt’s Possession follows two scholars, Maude Bailey and Roland Michell, as they research the lives of two famous poets, Christabel LaMotte and Randolph Henry Ash. Uncovering an array of secrets – including a torrid affair between the two Victorian poets – the scholars end up falling in love themselves. As the protagonists continue their academic quest for answers, Byatt infuses the story with poems, diary entries and letters that illuminate the poets’ feelings towards each other. A moving story filled with intriguing characters and a fast-paced, vibrant plot. Byatt’s prose is utterly captivating.
Emily Facoory, Digital content executive
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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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