The 1980s were a boom time for the Booker Prize. The decade gave us some of its most famous winners, from Midnight’s Children to The Remains of the Day. Literary fiction – and the sort of books the prize attracted – was more popular than ever, with writers like Martin Amis and Ian McEwan becoming household names.

The Booker was boosted by some canny decisions. In 1980, Penguin published paperback editions of five of the seven shortlisted books, enabling readers to make up their own minds before the winner was announced; and the following year, the prize ceremony was televised for the first time. Around this time, bookmakers also started to take bets on the winner.

Much of the success of the Booker Prize during this time was down to one man: Martyn Goff, who was the prize’s administrator from 1973 to 2006. He was expert not just at corralling the judges but at maximising publicity for the prize. As Booker judge Adam Mars-Jones put it, Goff was ‘both the choreographer of the Trooping the Colour and the anarchist with a small bomb. He was good at strategic leaks.’

In a rich decade for the Booker Prize, here is a selection of shortlisted books truly deserving of rediscovery.

Clear Light of Day by Anita Desai, shortlisted in 1980

This short, sharp novel was the first of Anita Desai’s three Booker shortlistings, and the first novel by an Indian writer to be shortlisted. (Desai has not yet won the prize, though her daughter, Kiran Desai, won in 2006 for a novel that was not only dedicated to Anita, but mostly written in her home.) Clear Light of Day tells the story of the Das siblings in India. Sister Bim and brother Baba have remained in the family home in Old Delhi, while sister Tara has left the country with her ambitious husband, and brother Raja has married the daughter of the family’s Muslim landlord.

It is an affectionate but unsentimental account of how a family’s self-contained truths may not survive outside exposure. It travels back and forward in time, taking in the partition of India and creation of Pakistan in 1947, which in their youth divided the siblings. For Raja the creation of a Muslim state was something to celebrate; for Bim an exciting rite of passage to mark childhood’s end; but for Tara, ‘I’m so glad it is over and we can never be young again.’ This is a great novel because its personal and political elements reinforce one another, and because Desai can also do comic relief in the ridiculous character of Dr Biswas, who uses his caring for Raja during a bout of TB as an excuse to woo Bim.

Perhaps a quiet novel like this was never likely to win in 1980, where the prize was dominated by the antics of Anthony Burgess, who famously refused to attend the ceremony after being told his bold epic Earthly Powers hadn’t won. In fact it may never have been in serious contention against winner Rites of Passage (which Burgess had publicly called ‘a bad book’): according to judge Claire Tomalin, the chair of the panel David Daiches opened the final session by saying, ‘We’ll go through the list in alphabetical order. I take it nobody considers Burgess a possible winner?’

Small World by David Lodge, shortlisted in 1984

One of the best English comic writers of the late 20th century, Lodge was shortlisted for the Booker Prize twice and judged it once. Small World is a sequel to his novel Changing Places, but can be read alone, as a chaotic carnival of pride, lust, sloth and other deadly sins in the world of higher education. Poorly attended conferences, idiotic academic papers (‘Textuality as a striptease’ – it’s even worse than it sounds), and the dangers of own-brand condoms are gleefully exploited.

The foolish male characters, driven largely by libido, think they’re in charge but are outwitted by the women at every turn. But as always with Lodge, there is plenty of intellectual meat to chew on, from the limitations of language to the contemporary relevance of our mythic past. 

In a Booker year where the novel to beat was Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, Small World had the support of only one judge: Anthony Curtis. In his memoir Writer’s Luck, Lodge says it was with some regret that he heard about how the final decision came about to award the prize to Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac. One of the judges, Polly Devlin, read persuasively to the rest of the panel from a highly positive review of Anita Brookner’s previous novel (‘I cannot praise too highly this novel’s poise, perceptiveness and purity of style’) – a review written by David Lodge.

Last Letters from Hav by Jan Morris, shortlisted in 1985

Best known as a travel writer and historian, Jan Morris brought both skills to work on her only novel. Last Letters from Hav is an energetic, vivid travelogue of an invented place, a city-state somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean. The narrator – Jan Morris – spends half a year there, exploring its historic sectors ruled by different empires, meeting people (including a Nazi) and observing the local maze-makers and roof-racers. There is little plot to speak of, other than some rumblings of ‘internal difficulties’ as Morris’s trip nears its end: mosques defaced, an attack on a chapel, sightings of mysterious black aircraft.

Last Letters from Hav gave no indication on the cover that it was a novel, and the Daily Mail and Time Out covered it as non-fiction, while a letter from the Royal Geographical Society asked for information on how to get to Hav. Morris did intend the book to be playful, even a sort of send-up of her own travel-writing style, but she also saw it as an allegory for our confusion in a turbulent world. ‘If it wasn’t true in the first place,’ the narrator writes, ‘so many centuries of belief have made it true now.’

Certainly 1985 was an ‘eccentric’ year for the Booker Prize, in the words of judge Marina Warner, who said the panel felt Morris’s novel ‘a bit slight’ to be a winner. Fellow judge Joanna Lumley was unable to attend the final meeting, but sent a note, including her view on Last Letters from Hav (‘somehow it’s voted itself away altogether ­– No’) and Keri Hulme’s The Bone People: ‘over-my-dead-body stuff’. But Lumley’s body was on stage in Brighton, and the voting went ahead in her absence in London, and The Bone People won.

Illywhacker by Peter Carey, shortlisted in 1985

A novel narrated by a 139-year-old man? (‘It is hard to believe you can feel so bad and still not die.’) Yes and no: Herbert Badgery, with his farts, his bad temper and his bodily problems (‘I think I’m growing tits’) is also a liar: an illywhacker, a trickster, a ‘rippety man’. The story takes us on a mad dash through his life, from an amputated finger to the ability to become invisible – and a good deal of grotesque, funny sex. Illywhacker is also a story of modern Australia itself.

Writing about liars and cheats has become a speciality for Carey, in books including My Life as a Fake, Theft: A Love Story (longlisted in 2006) and His Illegal Self. His novels remind us, in full colour and at top volume, of the magic of invention.

But as well as being one of the few writers to win the Booker twice – for Oscar and Lucinda in 1988, and True History of the Kelly Gang in 2001 – Carey has another Booker distinction. When Oscar and Lucinda was published in the UK, a production error led to one of its 111 short chapters being ‘somehow dropped out’, as Carey put it. The first UK edition therefore had only 110 chapters. This means Oscar and Lucinda’s victory in 1988 is the only time the Booker Prize has been won by a novel that is incomplete. At least as far as we know…

The Battle of Pollocks Crossing by J.L. Carr, shortlisted in 1985

Carr is mainly known as the author of one of the best-loved Booker novels of all: A Month in the Country. But he was shortlisted a second time for this novel, which joins classics like Howards End and Finnegans Wake in the library of titles with no apostrophe where we expect one. It’s about George Gidner, a teacher from Yorkshire, who travels to South Dakota in 1929. His excuse for going is ‘to return a different man’ (‘Why, what’s wrong with you?’ he’s asked in reply), but really he wants to study the locals and write a book about them.

George gets more than he bargained for with culture clashes in his new home in the American midwest (which is not even ‘a Real Town like Bradford’): no children in his new school are allowed to fail; he takes part in a disastrous hunting trip; and he chills the blood of the locals ‘by accounts of black English winters with no central heating’. The tone is comic, but the battle of the title adds complexity and depth, with a tragedy that George recalls from his old age decades later.

If this sounds like an unusual book, then it fits the author, who was a great English eccentric in the best sense. Carr, who died in 1994, was not just a writer, but a publisher and teacher, too. (When interviewed for teacher training and asked why the career appealed, he said, ‘Because it leaves so much time for other pursuits.’) His eight novels are all entirely different from one another. This fits, because Carr was in a sense unknowable: someone who had been a friend for 40 years found he knew only two other people at his funeral; and Carr’s family have still not found the family silver he told them he had buried in the back garden.

Anthills of the Savannah by Chinua Achebe, shortlisted in 1987

This was Chinua Achebe’s first novel in 21 years, and its caustic, comic portrayal of a corrupt African dictator reminded everyone what they had been missing. In the fictional state of Kangan – based loosely on Achebe’s native Nigeria – the hangers-on of the president share their experiences of his capricious mind. ‘Days are good or bad for us now depending on how His Excellency gets out of bed in the morning.’

Of course, ruling a country when you weren’t elected isn’t easy, and the president needs to quash the ‘hanky-panky’ of some irksome locals protesting about drought in their region. Random death is never more than a few pages away, and Achebe’s depiction of the sycophantic laughter of the president’s assistants, and his survival tool of appointing people who are loyal personally to him rather than to the needs of the country, has evergreen resonance. Achebe’s control of his perfectly-pitched comic tone is a great literary achievement amid the darkness he describes.

The judging panel in 1987 – which included the Booker’s first black or Asian judge in Trevor McDonald – opted unanimously for Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger instead of Anthills. Achebe wrote no further novels so was never shortlisted again; but the exceptional standard of his fiction was recognised when he won the International Man Booker Prize in 2007 for his entire body of work. He pronounced the accolade ‘wonderful’.

Utz by Bruce Chatwin, shortlisted in 1988

Utz is a brilliant miniature, a short but full novel, about a man who collects brilliant miniatures – Kaspar Joachim Utz from Czechoslovakia, the proud owner of more than one thousand pieces of Meissen porcelain. A man with ‘a face so featureless it gave the impression of not being there’, Utz lives for his collection, and the book is about how we try to use our obsessions to shield us from the outside world. In 20th century eastern Europe, there is plenty to hide from. ‘Things are tougher than people,’ the narrator says. ‘Things are the changeless mirror in which we watch ourselves disintegrate.’

Chatwin, who made his name as a travel writer, fills Utz’s story with persuasive historiographical details that make it read like a biography, much of it inspired by people he knew: a man who studies houseflies, a comic misunderstanding in a restaurant, a secret marriage. When Utz was shortlisted for the Booker, Chatwin tried to strike a deal with Salman Rushdie, whose novel The Satanic Verses was also on the shortlist, to share the prize if they won: ‘Let’s just think about it,’ responded Rushdie. It was Chatwin’s first shortlisting for the Booker Prize but his last novel, written when he was living with HIV: he was too ill to attend the prize ceremony, and died less than three months later, in January 1989.

The case of Chatwin, now largely overlooked, is an object lesson in the fleeting nature of literary fame. In his lifetime his name was ubiquitous, and his books bestsellers. He was sufficiently famous that when Utz was shortlisted for the Booker, Private Eye magazine satirised him as ‘Bruce Hatpin’, the author of ‘Tutsi-Frutsi’, the story of a ‘Viennese ice cream collector’ who one day ‘wakes up and finds that they have all melted.’ The parody added that the writer was ‘an insatiable nomad, [who] lives in Notting Hill like everybody else.’

The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald, shortlisted in 1988

‘How is it done?’ asked Jan Morris in wonder at this extraordinary novel. Penelope Fitzgerald had already won the Booker Prize, for Offshore, but The Beginning of Spring is regarded by many fans as her best book, and it was Fitzgerald’s own favourite among her novels. As the title suggests, it’s a book of change set in 1913 in ‘the magnificent and ramshackle’ Russia, with a country approaching revolution, and a world approaching war.

The characters are a British family in Moscow, and the book opens with Frank Reid coming home to find that his wife has left with their three children. The story doesn’t stint on plot – featuring a burglar-assassin, a performing bear, and a colleague who ‘out of sheer tenderness of heart … liked every emergency to go on as long as possible’ – and the storyline doesn’t rest until the very last line of the very last page. But it’s the atmosphere you remember, and the mysteries of life abroad, and the wonder at Fitzgerald’s sheer skill in creating what Hermione Lee called an ‘intensely compressed, though spacious-seeming, novel’.

Fitzgerald judged the Booker Prize twice herself, though neither was an entirely happy experience. In 1991, her choice (Roddy Doyle’s The Van) failed to win, and in 1998 she snapped at Valentine Cunningham for calling writers’ work their ‘stuff’ (‘They’re not stuff!’), and ‘felt like weeping’ when nobody else liked Magnus Mills’s The Restraint of Beasts. ‘It’s always the same,’ she later said. ‘You make up your mind to remain calm, dispassionate and civilised and then as the meetings go on you become increasingly heated and quarrelsome.’

The Book of Evidence by John Banville, shortlisted in 1989

In this novel you can see both sides of John Banville – the Booker-winning lover of language, and the crime novelist. The Book of Evidence is the confession of the charming but deadly Freddie Montgomery, written from his prison cell. It is a jeu d’esprit for Banville, a lovely game where the influence of his hero Vladimir Nabokov can be seen right from the first luxurious paragraph, with Freddie, ‘the girl-eater, svelte and dangerous, padding to and fro in my cage’.

It is also a representation of how fictional characters work. Freddie, with his seductive web of language, creates himself before our eyes, and even though we know what he has done – because he tells us – we can’t help but love him. And this novel, which introduced Banville’s most enduring character, is more accessible than the later books featuring Freddie: Ghosts, Athena and The Singularities.

Banville would go on to win the Booker in 2005 for The Sea. His characteristic dry humour was not universally appreciated when he acknowledged his victory with the words, ‘It is nice to see a work of art win the Booker Prize.’ He later claimed he said this partly to ‘annoy’ people. It worked: ‘The goalkeeper jumped the wrong way,’ was shortlisted rival Kazuo Ishiguro’s comment on Banville’s win.

Jigsaw by Sybille Bedford, shortlisted in 1989

When the 1989 Booker winner was announced (Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day), the Washington Post described Sybille Bedford as one of the ‘much better-known’ authors on the list; yet, like Bruce Chatwin, she is now all but invisible. This is a shame, since Jigsaw is an exceptional achievement – a vivid, inventive novel of remembrance and change set largely on the Cote d’Azur in the 1920s and 30s, as stylish as it is profound. Like all Bedford’s novels, it is largely autobiographical, but it plays with the line between fiction and memory in the same way as Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room. 

As Billi, the novel’s narrator, reads and reads her way through childhood, she thinks, ‘Please God, make me a writer, but not yet.’ Bedford didn’t publish a novel until her mid-40s, and was 78 when she was shortlisted for Jigsaw, making her the oldest Booker-shortlisted author until Margaret Atwood was shortlisted (and later won) in 2019 for The Testaments.

1989 was a very strong year for the Booker Prize, with one of its most enduring shortlists, even allowing for the notorious omission of Martin Amis’s novel London Fields. It was an appropriate high point to mark the prize’s 20th anniversary, and the end of a transformational decade for the prize. After the 1989 ceremony, Malcolm Bradbury, who was on the Booker Prize management committee, was interviewed by the BBC. Asked how he felt the prize had fared in its quest to represent the best in fiction, he responded: ‘On the whole, not bad.’