From the skies to the sea, India to Russia, Jamaica to Korea, the Booker Prizes have seen their fair share of epic tales – tales that span centuries, societies, worlds and myths. As a new blockbuster adaptation of The Odyssey hits the big screen, set out on an epic adventure of your own… all from your favourite reading spot. 

We’ve defined our ‘epics’ as books that feature sweeping narratives, set on a grand scale, grand settings, with large casts of characters, or with a plot that spans years or generations. Our writers tackle these feats with sparkling brilliance – all different but all compelling.  

Here’s our list of epic tales that have been nominated for the Booker or International Booker Priize. There’s something here for readers of all genres: adventure, satire, thriller, historical fiction, magical realism, romance and more. 

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry 

In an unnamed city by the sea in mid-1970s India, a State of Internal Emergency has been declared. In the tiny flat of the widowed Dina Dalal, Ishvar and Omprakash Darji, tailors who have been forced from their village into the city, and Maneck Kohlah, a young student from a hill-station near the Himalayas, are painfully constructing new lives, which become entwined in circumstances no one could have foreseen. 

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1996, A Fine Balance is an epic panorama of modern India in all its corruption, violence and heroism. The London Review Bookshop described it as a ‘masterpiece: a Dickensian modern classic brimming with compassion, humour, and insight – and a hymn to the human spirit in an inhuman state’.

The Eighth Life by Nino Haratischvili, translated by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin 

The Eight Life is a compelling, epic Russian family drama. As we tumble down the years, from the start of the 20^th century, we see relationships come and go as the central family prospers. It owes its success to a delicious chocolate recipe, passed down the generations with great solemnity and caution. A caution that is justified: this is a recipe for ecstasy that carries a very bitter aftertaste.  

Spanning over a century of tumultuous Georgian and Soviet history, this family chronicle was longlisted for the International Booker prize in 2020. In the Guardian, Maya Jaggi hailed Collins’ and Martin’s translation as ‘subtle and compelling’, describing the book as a ‘literary phenomenon’.  

Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie 

The winner of the Booker Prize in 1981, Rushdie’s beloved epic orbits the life of Saleem Sinai, a whirlwind of disasters and triumphs that mirror the course of modern India at its most impossible. Born at midnight on 15 August, 1947, at the precise moment of India’s independence, Saleem is celebrated in the press and welcomed by Prime Minister Nehru himself. But this coincidence of birth has consequences: telepathic powers that connect him with 1,000 other ‘midnight’s children’ – all born in the initial hour of India’s independence – and an uncanny sense of smell that allows him to sniff out danger imperceptible to others. 

A masterpiece of magical realism, the book was praised by V. S. Pritchett in the New Yorker, who noted that Rushdie ‘weaves a whole people’s capacity for carrying its inherited myths – and new ones that it goes on generating – into a kind of magic carpet’. Pritchett added that ‘India has produced a glittering novelist’.  

A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James 

A dazzling display of masterful storytelling, A Brief History of Seven Killings sees Marlon James explore the extraordinary backstory to the real-life attempted assassination of Bob Marley – a near mythical event. The novel is a mesmerising, continent-crossing tale that spans three decades, with a shadowy cast of street kids, drug lords, journalists, prostitutes, gunmen and secret-service agents. 

Winning the Booker Prize in 2015, A Brief History of Seven Killings shot to worldwide acclaim. Bernardine Evaristo, fellow Booker Prize winner, commented, ‘while this is a highly literary novel, it’s also a page-turning thriller and very “gangster” – succeeding at both, equally. Experimental but readable, physically visceral and intellectual. It’s all of it – not one or the other.’ 

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan 

In Flanagan’s 2014 Booker Prize-winning novel, a love story unfolds over half a century, as we learn of one man’s reckoning with the truth. It is set against the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the infamous Thailand-Burma Death Railway, where Flanagan’s own father worked as a slave labourer during the Second World War. In the novel, we are introduced to surgeon Dorrigo Evans, a man haunted by his love affair with his uncle’s young wife two years earlier. Struggling to save the men under his command from starvation, cholera and beatings, he receives a letter that will change his life forever. 

In the Sydney Morning Herald, Morag Fraser described the book as ‘a huge novel, ambitious, driven, multi-stranded, and unembarrassed by its documentary impulse. It is both record and tribute to the men who lived and died alongside [the author’s] father, but tribute of the best kind a novelist son could pay – transmuting filial obligation into engrossing narrative’. 

Whale by Cheon Myeong-kwan, translated by Chi-Young Kim  

Whale is an adventure-satire of epic proportions, which sheds new light on the changes Korea experienced in its rapid transition from pre-modern to post-modern society. Set in a remote village in South Korea, we follow the lives of three linked characters: Geumbok, an extremely ambitious woman who has been chasing an indescribable thrill ever since she first saw a whale crest in the ocean; her mute daughter, Chunhui, who communicates with elephants; and a one-eyed woman who controls honeybees with a whistle.  

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2023, Whale was described a ‘rollercoaster adventure through Korean history and culture’ by the year’s judges. They praised it as a ‘magical and grotesque epic about life and death, liberty and self-fulfilment’, not to be overlooked for its humour.  

Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead 

Great Circle chronicles the lives of a fearless female aviator and the actress who portrays her on screen, as their paths go on to intersect decades later. Marian Graves was a daredevil all her life, from her wild childhood in the forests of Montana to her daring wartime Spitfire missions. In 1950, she sets off on her ultimate adventure, the Great Circle – a flight around the globe. She is never seen again. Half a century later, Hadley Baxter, a scandal-ridden Hollywood actress, whose own parents perished in a plane crash, is irresistibly drawn to play Marian Graves. This role will lead her to uncover the real mystery behind the vanished pilot. 

Great Circle was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2021. In the New York Times Lynn Steger Strong commented that it’s an epic tale that ‘starts high and maintains altitude. One might say it soars… It grasps for and ultimately reaches something extraordinary. It pulls off this feat through individual sentences and sensations – by getting each secondary and tertiary character right’.

In Ascension by Martin MacInnes 

Exploring the natural world with wonder and reverence, this compassionate, deeply inquisitive epic reaches outward to confront the great questions of existence, while looking inward to illuminate the human heart. When a trench is discovered deep in the Atlantic Ocean, Leigh joins the exploration team, hoping to find evidence of Earth’s first life forms. What she instead finds calls into question everything we know about our own beginnings, and leaves her facing an impossible choice: to remain with her family, or to embark on a journey across the cosmos.    

Longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2023, In Ascension was described by Beejay Silcox in the TLS as a ‘tender novel for a climate ravaged age’. Silcox added that the book ‘finds as much poetry in the human microbiome as it does in the grand revolutions of the planets. It is a love letter to life, to “the stuff of the world”. You only see what you’re prepared to see, Martin MacInnes shows us. His book is a primer to marvel.’ 

Life of Pi by Yann Martel 

Yann Martel’s 2002 Booker Prize-winning Life of Pi is a true modern classic; a warmly engaging philosophical novel, brimming with invention, ideas and playful conceits. It is narrated by Pi (Piscine) Molitor, who grows up as the son of a zoo manager in India. As a boy, Pi practices not only Hinduism but also the teachings of Christianity and Islam – in his eyes, all different yet equal ways of knowing God. In 1976, when The Emergency is announced, the Molitors’ zoo animals are sold, and Pi and his family embark on a Japanese freight ship to North America. It sinks a few days into its passage. Pi is left alone on a lifeboat with a hyena, a zebra, an orangutan, and a tiger named Richard Parker.  

In The Nation, Chalotte Innes wrote, ‘it is above all a book about life’s absurdities that makes one laugh out loud on almost every page, with its quirky juxtapositions, comparisons, metaphors, Borgesian puzzles, postmodern games and a sense of fun’. 

Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree, translated by Daisy Rockwell 

In northern India, an 80-year-old woman slips into a deep depression at the death of her husband, then resurfaces to gain a new lease of life. Her determination to fly in the face of convention confuses her bohemian daughter, who is used to thinking of herself as the more ‘modern’ of the two. To her family’s consternation, Ma then insists on travelling to Pakistan, confronting the unresolved trauma of her teenage experiences of Partition. Despite its serious themes, Geetanjali Shree’s light touch and exuberant wordplay (brought to life in Daisy Rockwell’s English translation) ensures that Tomb of Sand remains constantly playful – and utterly original.  

As the winner of the International Booker Prize in 2022, this epic blends intimate story with massive, sweeping historical scale. Frank Wynne, chair of the judges for 2022’s prize, said: ‘Its spellbinding brio and fierce compassion weaves youth and age, male and female, family and nation into a kaleidoscopic whole’. 

Mater 2-10 by Hwang Sok-yong, translated by Sora Kim-Russell and Youngjae Josephine Bae 

Mater 2-10 is a vast, multi-generational tale that threads together a century of Korean history. It centres on three generations of a family of rail workers and a laid-off factory worker staging a high-altitude sit-in. The novel vividly depicts the lives of ordinary working Koreans, starting in the Japanese colonial era, continuing through Liberation, and taking readers right up to the 21st century.  

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2024, the book was praised by the judges who loved its blend of a nation’s ‘sweeping historical narrative’ with ‘an individual’s quest for justice’. They went on to say that Mater 2-10 is a ‘large and comprehensive book about Korea that we rarely see in the West’.