The Booker Prize in the 1990s: 10 novels that are well worth revisiting

By the 1990s, the Booker Prize was the lynchpin of the literary prize year, and continued to transform the fortunes of its winners. In 1993, Roddy Doyle’s winner, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, sold an incredible 27,000 copies in the first half hour after the announcement. 

The prize induced strong opinions. In 1992, A.N. Wilson called the prize ‘essentially trivial’, though evidently changed his mind when he agreed to judge it four years later (and caused the Booker administrator to panic when Wilson hand-signalled the winner en route to his table at the prize dinner). 

In this decade, the main blot on the Booker’s record was its egregious gender imbalance. Between 1991 and 1995, 29 writers were shortlisted, of which 25 were men and only four women: and it was the all-male shortlist of 1991 that ultimately led to the establishment of the Women’s Prize for Fiction. 

Here are some of the best shortlisted novels from the 1990s, which remain essential reading today. 

Lies of Silence by Brian Moore, shortlisted in 1990 

Belfast-born Brian Moore’s only novel set in the Northern Irish Troubles is an exceptional one. It takes us through a few suffocating days in the life of Michael Dillon, a man driven by impulse, a hotel manager who’s juggling an extra-marital affair (for which unbooked hotel rooms come in handy). But when IRA members force him to drive a car bomb to his workplace, we enter a world of heart-stopping action and moral dilemmas. ‘Once again his life had taken a wrong turning. Once again he had acted too late.’ 

Lies of Silence is an angry book, critical of social divisions in Northern Ireland and of ‘the lies of silence from those in Westminster’ who permitted them to continue. Yet besides its political force, this is a novel which is impossible to stop reading. Moore knew how to make the pages turn, and had brought his interest in the thriller form to Hollywood, where he worked with Alfred Hitchcock on the 1966 film Torn Curtain (an experience, however, which he later described as ‘awful, like washing floors’). 

Lies of Silence was Moore’s third and final Booker shortlisting, though his publishers hoped for one more. In 1993, they were so convinced that his novel No Other Life was a shoo-in for the prize that they published it early in the year, to enable maximum publicity for the book through interviews across the UK in advance of the shortlist decision. Perhaps the tactic was clear, as Moore in one interview had to defend himself against the charge of writing to a ‘Booker-winning formula’ – despite never having won. 

Such a Long Journey by Rohinton Mistry, shortlisted in 1991 

A man ‘swimming in the tidewater of the fifth decade of his life’ is about to start drowning: Gustad Noble, a struggling bank clerk, gets involved in a scheme with his friend Jimmy, whom he trusts implicitly ever since Jimmy rescued him as a child. ‘He knew it would be all right. Jimmy would look after everything.’ But complications await in this story set among the Parsi community in Bombay, and a sometimes comic family story becomes a busy account of corruption and desperation. Such a Long Journey is at once personal and political, and studded with Mistry’s calmly beautiful descriptions and pinpoint character observations, like the nosy neighbour whose ‘crazy rubbish could make even a sane brain somersault permanently’.  

In 1991, the Booker Prize saw one of its rare resignations by a judge: Nicholas Mosley walked out in protest, complaining that ‘I got none of my choices on the list’, and arguing that the other judges preferred style over ideas. 

Rohinton Mistry holds a unique accolade in Booker history: the author of three novels, he has seen all three shortlisted for the prize. (A Fine Balance followed in 1996, and Family Matters in 2002.) However, he has published no further novels in the 23 years since his last shortlisting. Readers eagerly await his return, and not just to see if he can keep up his 100% record. 

The Orchard on Fire by Shena Mackay, shortlisted in 1996 

Colour and energy buzz through this novel about a young girl’s upbringing in a village in Kent where her parents have taken over the local tea rooms. At school, April Harlency becomes fast friends with troublemaking fellow pupil Ruby (whom she first meets setting fire to a toilet roll in a pub). The joy of The Orchard on Fire is Mackay’s creation of so many memorable characters, from headmaster Major Morton, who ‘had a steel plate in his head and was subject to terrible headaches and rages which shook the school’, to Professor Scoley, who inconsiderately dies while April and Ruby are escorting him to a lecture, to the creepy Mr Greenidge, who declares his love for young April – and who makes her feel so sorry for him that she declares it back. This is the story of a child not understanding and then coming to understand, and the question of which is worse. 

Three years after her shortlisting, Shena Mackay herself judged the prize. ‘Being a judge gave me much more anxiety than being on the shortlist myself,’ she said. Meanwhile one judge from 1996, A.L. Kennedy, came out fighting a few years later, declaring the prize to be ‘a pile of crooked nonsense’ where the winner was determined by ‘who’s sleeping with who, who’s selling drugs to who, who’s married to who, whose turn it is, and added that on her panel, ‘I read the 300 novels and no other bastard did.’ Her fellow judge Jonathan Coe was unperturbed. “She has exaggerated the number of books we had to read by a factor of three, and maybe you should scale her other comments back accordingly.’ 

Quarantine by Jim Crace, shortlisted in 1997 

The peculiar stamp of Jim Crace’s genius is all over this novel – probably his best – which opens irresistibly with a scene where a woman observes that ‘her husband was being baked alive. Good news.’ But then, the man is a wicked bully in first century Judea, and she’s hoping for a better husband next time. Alongside the couple are four people undergoing quarantine – 40 days and nights – in the wilderness as a plea to God to overcome their suffering (‘madness, madness, cancer, infertility’). And alongside them is a young Galilean man who believes he can survive the period without eating or drinking. They call him Gally, though we know him better as Jesus. 

Quarantine was an attempt by Crace, who describes himself as a ‘post-Dawkins scientific atheist’, to subtly dent Christian faith, by showing that Jesus could not really survive his period of fasting. But the tale twisted, as tales do when writers think they have them under control, and it became a book which he found ‘underscored people’s faith in gods rather than undermined it’. This was fitting enough for a writer whose rhythmic prose has a biblical heft to it, and who has never shied away from moral issues. Booker winner A.S. Byatt said the book showed that Crace ‘wants to be the heir to William Golding – he writes the mythical allegory set in a strange place, where somehow you’re fighting out elemental spiritual battles’. It was a view with which the self-deprecating Crace playfully agreed, to an extent, some years later. ‘Since William Golding,’ he said, ‘no one has been more pompously moralistic in novels until you get to my stuff.’ 

Headlong by Michael Frayn, shortlisted in 1999 

Headlong accurately describes the pace of this convulsive farce of a young academic beginning a new career as an art thief, and making himself into the loneliest man in the world with a secret he can’t tell anyone else. Martin Clay discovers a forgotten painting by the Dutch master Brueghel, and all he has to do is wrest it from its unsuspecting – and appalling – owner. ‘Really, it’s like taking candy off a child. I should have become a confidence trickster ages ago.’ It’s a masterpiece of tension, comedy and pressure as Martin’s deceits create a mesmerising fictional structure from which he – and the reader – can’t escape. Frayn is readable and chewy at the same time, with a particular skill in showing the tormented ways we layer our thoughts and drive ourselves mad in the process. Interrupted with details on art history which prevent the main plot from overheating, Headlong is one of the most purely pleasurable reads in the Booker Prize’s history. 

It was Frayn’s first appearance on the Booker lists after more than three decades of writing fiction: his 1968 novel A Very Private Life was rejected in the prize’s first year when judge Rebecca West deemed it ‘curiously dull’. And his shortlisting in 1999 no doubt came as a comfort after he lost a bet with his wife that Rose Tremain would be on the shortlist. 

At the winner announcement in 1999, chairman Gerald Kaufman took the rare step of announcing a runner-up: Anita Desai’s Fasting, Feasting. If this was an attempt to mollify some of his panel, it failed, as this year saw one of the most public fallings-out among Booker judges. John Sutherland wrote an article suggesting that there was a gender split among the panel, which Shena Mackay and Natasha Walter denounced as ‘pure fantasy’ and ‘self-serving gossip’. Another judge, Boyd Tonkin, added, ‘I think John just did not get what he wanted, which was Frayn.’ 

And so ended the Booker Prize’s third full, and fully eventful, decade. ‘Every year there’s some weirdness,’ Booker Prize founder Tom Maschler had said in 1997. And long may it continue.