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The Man Booker Prize 2010

Howard Jacobson, 2010
Winner
Shortlist
Longlist

Victory at last for Howard Jacobson, self-proclaimed as ‘a Jewish Jane Austen’ with The Finkler Question, the first comic novel to win since Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils in 1986.

Even a comic novel needs more than gags and Jacobson’s book is also a moving examination of friendship, love, loss and, of course, Jewishness. The author, then 68, had almost despaired of winning the prize, stating that he was adept at writing unused acceptance speeches (‘I note that my language in these speeches grows less gracious with the years’).

But when the time came he rose to the moment, saying he’d spend the prize money on a handbag for his wife: ‘Have you seen the price of handbags?’ 

The Finkler Question
The Finkler Question

The Finkler Question

Winner of The Booker Prize 2010

Published by
Bloomsbury
A scorching story of friendship and loss, exclusion and belonging, and of the wisdom and humanity of maturity, from the brilliant Howard Jacobson

The shortlist

Room
Told from the perspective of five-year-old Jack, Emma Donoghue’s profoundly affecting novel is a devastating portrait of a boundless maternal love
In a Strange Room
Damon Galgut’s haunting evocation of one man’s search for love and a place to call home - a novel of longing and thwarted desire, rage and compassion
The Finkler Question
Prize winner
A scorching story of friendship and loss, exclusion and belonging, and of the wisdom and humanity of maturity, from the brilliant Howard Jacobson
The Long Song
Andrea Levy’s bittersweet novel about the last days of slavery in Jamaica is powerful and intimate - and full of mischievous surprise
C
Tom McCarthy’s intense life of a man steeped in the electric modernity of the early 20th century, transfixed by technologies that will obliterate him

The longlist

C

C

by Tom McCarthy

The 2010 judges