Annal:1994 Man Booker Prize for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Man Booker Prize in the year 1994. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 1994 Booker winner
- Score: 10.44
A raw, wry vision of human survival in a bureaucratic world, How Late It Was, How Late opens one Sunday morning in Glasgow, Scotland, as Sammy, an ex-convict with a penchant for shoplifting, awakens in a lane and tries to remember the two-day drinking binge that landed him there. Then, things only get worse. Sammy gets in a fight with some soldiers, lands in jail, and discovers that he is completely blind. His girlfriend disappears, the police probe him endlessly, and his stab at Disability Compensation embroils him in the Kafkaesque red tape of the…
- 1994 Booker shortlist
- Score: 6.44
Reef is the elegant and moving story of Triton, a talented young chef so committed to pleasing his master’s palate that he is oblivious to the political unrest threatening his Sri Lankan paradise. It is a personal story that parallels the larger movement of a country from a hopeful, young democracy to troubled island society. It is also a mature, poetic novel which the British press has compared to the works of James Joyce, Graham Greene, V.S. Naipaul, and Anton Chekhov.
Reef explores the entwined lives of Mr. Salgado, an aristocratic marine…
- 1994 Booker shortlist
- Score: 6.44
Paradise is at once the story of an African boy’s coming of age, a tragic love story, and a tale of the corruption of traditional African patterns by European colonialism. It presents a major African voice to American readers—a voice that prompted Peter Tinniswood to write in the London Times, reviewing Gurnah’s previous novel, “Mr. Gurnah is a very fine writer. I am certain he will become a great one.” Paradise is Abdulrazak Gurnah’s great novel. At twelve, Yusuf, the protagonist of this twentieth-century odyssey, is sold by his father in repayment of a debt.…
- 1994 JT Black-Fiction winner
- 1994 Booker shortlist
- Score: 16.44
Edward Manners—thirty-three, disaffected, in search of a new life—has come to an ancient Flemish city to teach English. Almost at once he falls in love with one of his pupils, the seventeen-year-old Luc Altidore, recently expelled from school for some mysterious offense.
Condemned to a mounting but incommunicable obsession with the boy, Edward becomes involved in affairs with two other men: one a heartless but seductive fraud, the other a young drifter with a deeply possessive streak. Then Edward is introduced to the world of the enigmatic and reclusive…
- 1994 Booker shortlist
- Score: 6.44
In this novel set on the fictitious island of Norday in the Orkneys, George Mackay Brown beckons us into the imaginary world of the young Thorfinn Ragnarson, the son of a crofter. In his day-dreams he relives the history of this island people, travelling back in time to join Viking adventurers at the court of the Byzantine Emperor in Constantinople, then accompanying a Falstaffian knight to the battle of Bannockburn.
Thorfinn wakes to the twentieth century and a community whose way of life, steeped in legend and tradition, has remained unchanged for centuries.…
- 1994 Booker shortlist
- Score: 6.44
It is, perhaps, the fifteenth century and the ordered tranquillity of a Mediterranean island is about to be shattered by the appearance of two outsiders: one, a castaway, plucked from the sea by fishermen, whose beliefs represent a challenge to the established order; the other, a child abandoned by her mother and suckled by wolves, who knows nothing of the precarious relationship between Church and State but whose innocence will become the subject of a dangerous experiment.
But the arrival of the Inquisition on the island creates a darker, more threatening…
