Annal:2001 Man Booker Prize for Fiction

From AwardAnnals

Jump to: navigation, search

Results of the Man Booker Prize in the year 2001. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:

True History of the Kelly Gang: A Novel

Peter Carey

Out of nineteenth-century Australia rides a hero of his people and a man for all nations, in this masterpiece by the Booker Prize-winning author of Oscar and Lucinda and Jack Maggs. Exhilarating, hilarious, panoramic, and immediately engrossing, it is also—at a distance of many thousand miles and more than a century—a Great American Novel.

This is Ned Kelly’s true confession, in his own words and written on the run for an infant daughter he has never seen. To the authorities, this son of dirt-poor Irish immigrants was a born thief and,…

 

Atonement: A Novel

Ian McEwan

On the hottest day of the summer of 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her older sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching Cecilia is their housekeeper’s son Robbie Turner, a childhood friend who, along with Briony’s sister, has recently graduated from Cambridge.

By the end of that day the lives of all three will have been changed forever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had never before dared to approach and will have become victims of the younger girl’s scheming imagination. And Briony will have committed a dreadful crime, the guilt for which will color her entire life.

Atonement is Ian McEwan’s finest achievement. Brilliant and utterly enthralling in its depiction of childhood, love and war, England and class, the novel is at its center a profound–and profoundly moving–exploration of shame and forgiveness and the difficulty of absolution.

 

Oxygen

Andrew Miller

It is the summer of 1997. Alec Valentine is returning to England to care for his ailing mother, Alice, a task that only reinforces his deep sense of inadequacy. In San Francisco, his older brother Larry prepares to come home as well, preoccupied with an acting career that is sliding toward sleaze and a marriage that is faltering. In Paris, on the other hand, the Hungarian playwright Lászlo Lázár seems to have it all—critical acclaim, a loving boyfriend, and a close circle of friends—yet even he is haunted by guilt and tragedy. For each of them the time has come…

 

Number9Dream: A Novel

David Mitchell

Number9Dream is the international literary sensation from a writer with astonishing range and imaginative energy—an intoxicating ride through Tokyo’s dark underworlds and the even more mysterious landscapes of our collective dreams.

David Mitchell follows his eerily precocious, globe-striding first novel, Ghostwritten, with a work that is in its way even more ambitious. In outward form, Number9Dream is a Dickensian coming-of-age journey: Young dreamer Eiji Miyake, from remote rural Japan, thrust out on his own by his sister’s death and…

 

The Dark Room: A Novel

Rachel Seiffert

A debut novel that retells the history of twentieth-century Germany through the experiences of three ordinary Germans.

Helmut: A boy born with a physical deformity finds work as a photographer’s assistant during the 1930s and captures on film the changing temper of Berlin, the city he loves. But his acute photographic eye never provides him with the power to understand the significance of what he sees through his camera. . . . Lore: In the weeks following Germany’s surrender, a teenage girl whose parents are both in Allied captivity takes her younger siblings…

 

Hotel World

Ali Smith

Woooooooo-hooooooo.

Five people: four are living; three are strangers; two are sisters; one, a teenage hotel chambermaid, has fallen to her death in a dumbwaiter. But her spirit lingers in the world, straining to recall things she never knew. And one night all five women find themselves in the smooth plush environs of the Global Hotel, where the intersection of their very different fates make for this playful, defiant, and richly inventive novel.

Forget room service: this is a riotous elegy, a deadpan celebration of colliding worlds, and a spirited defense…

 
Personal tools