John Fuller’s hauntingly strange and lyrical novel. On a desolate island monastery in the Middle Ages, pilgrims are going missing one by one…
By John Fuller
The Booker Prize 1983
Fay Weldon
The first win for one of the prize’s hallowed names, J.M. Coetzee, for The Life and Times of Michael K., and a domestic revelation from the chair of judges that one wouldn’t hear today.
Michael K, with a cleft lip and ‘not right in the head’, has to make a long journey carrying his mother and then her ashes through apartheid-era South Africa during a fictional war. Stages of isolation, malnourishment, mistreatment, and escape must be passed through.
Some critics found in Michael K. a resemblance to Josef K. in Franz Kafka’s The Trial. The chair of judges, Fay Weldon, later admitted disarmingly that she was unused to decision making: ‘My husband makes them all.’
Winner The Booker Prize 1983
- By
- J.M. Coetzee
- Published by
- Secker & Warburg
In his first Booker Prize-winning novel, J.M. Coetzee sets his main character on an arduous physical journey, which becomes a quest for inner freedom.
The shortlist
Set in the first years of the Christian Church, Anita Mason’s novel tells the story of Simon Magus, mentioned in Acts of the Apostles as a magician.
By Anita Mason
Salman Rushdie combines magic realism with a fierce rivalry to illustrate his central theme - that shame begets violence and violence begets shame.
Two East Anglian families are linked by a deep secret in Graham Swift’s eloquent and poignant exploration of water, history, desire and tragedy.
By Graham Swift
In his first Booker Prize-winning novel, J.M. Coetzee sets his main character on an arduous physical journey, which becomes a quest for inner freedom.
By J.M. Coetzee
Dr Angus Petworth travels to the small, eastern European country of Slaka. Confusion ensues, in Malcolm Bradbury's entertaining and witty novel.
