Bernice Rubens explores what happens to a respectable, close-knit Jewish family when the apple of his parents’ eyes becomes a middle-aged drug addict.
The Booker Prize 1970
Bernice Rubens
The prize had its first female winner when Bernice Rubens triumphed with The Elected Member, a tale of a man suffering amphetamine psychosis who sees silverfish everywhere.
Rubens, the daughter of two Eastern European emigrants, was born in Cardiff and made her way to fiction after spells as a grammar-school teacher and documentary maker. Her win showed that from the start the Booker Prize was not afraid of being challenging: the travails of her unhinged central character, Norman Zweck, do not make for easy reading.
Rubens was, however, clear-sighted, not least about her own writing, which she judged: ‘Better than most, not as good as some.’
Winner The Booker Prize 1970
- By
- Bernice Rubens
- Published by
- Eyre & Spottiswoode
Bernice Rubens explores what happens to a respectable, close-knit Jewish family when the apple of his parents’ eyes becomes a middle-aged drug addict.
The shortlist
A vulnerable young woman becomes fascinated by her neighbour, a man she suspects of an appalling crime, in A.L. Barker’s extraordinary fourth novel.
By A.L. Barker
Elizabeth Bowen’s portrayal of an unconventional heiress with a huge 'capacity for making trouble, attracting trouble, strewing trouble around her'.
Obsessed with spiders and preoccupied with death, an old man lies at the centre of Iris Murdoch’s intricate web of relationships and passions.
By Iris Murdoch
What tragedy turned O'Neill's hotel from a plush establishment into a dingy house of disrepute? William Trevor sends Mrs Eckdorf to investigate.
This Terence Wheeler novel is a speculation on how power passes from one generation to the next and how one buries the other.
