Annal:2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Man Booker Prize in the year 2004. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2004 Booker winner
- 2004 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- 2004 Whitbread-Novel shortlist
- Score: 22.54
In the summer of 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby-whom Nick had idolized at Oxford-and Catherine, highly critical of her family’s assumptions and ambitions.
As the boom years of the eighties unfold, Nick, an innocent in the world of politics and money, finds his life altered by the rising fortunes of this glamorous family. His two vividly contrasting love affairs, one with a young black clerk and one…
- 2004 Booker shortlist
- 2003 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 12.54
This novel provides insight into the intricacies of a changing South Africa at the end of the 1990s. Silas Ali, a former political activist, now a middle-aged civil servant working on the final Truth and Reconciliation Commission report, is shopping in the Killarney Mall in Johannesburg when he bumps into a ghost from his past-Lieutenant François du Boise, a retired security policeman. This chance encounter brings back a memory that Silas and his wife Lydia have been avoiding for 20 years. The past erupts into the present, cracking off the shell of normalcy that…
- 2004 Booker shortlist
- Score: 6.54
Opening on the windswept front of Morecambe Bay, on the remote north-west coast of England, The Electric Michelangelo is a novel of love, loss and the art of tattooing.
In the uniquely sensuous and lyrical prose that has already become her trademark, Sarah Hall’s remarkable new novel tells the story of Cy Parks, from his childhood years spent in a seaside guest house for consumptives with his mother, Reeda, to his apprenticeship as a tattoo-artist with Eliot Riley—a scraper with a reputation as a Bolshevik and a drinker to boot.
His skills acquired…
Cloud Atlas: A Novel
- 2005 Clarke shortlist
- 2004 Booker shortlist
- 2004 JT Black-Fiction shortlist
- 2004 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- 2004 Nebula nominee
- Score: 30.55
Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Along the way, Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. Abruptly, the action jumps to Belgium in 1931, where Robert Frobisher, a disinherited bisexual composer, inveigles his way into the household of an infirm maestro who has a beguiling wife and a nubile daughter. From there we jump to the West Coast in the 1970s and a troubled reporter named Luisa Rey, who stumbles…
- 2006 IMPAC Dublin winner
- 2004 LATimes–Fiction winner
- 2004 Booker shortlist
- Score: 26.56
Like Michael Cunningham in The Hours, Colm Tóibín captures the extraordinary mind and heart of a great writer. Brilliant and profoundly moving, The Master tells the story of Henry James, a man born into one of America’s first intellectual families two decades before the Civil War. James left his country to live in Paris, Rome, Venice, and London among privileged artists and writers.
In stunningly resonant prose, Tóibín captures the loneliness and longing, the hope and despair of a man who never married, never resolved his sexual identity, and…
- 2004 Booker shortlist
- Score: 6.54
Colette Jones has had drink problems in the past, but now it seems as though her whole family is in danger of turning to alcohol. Her oldest son has thrown away a promising musical career for a job behind the counter in a builders’ merchants, and his drinking sprees with his brother-in-law Bill, a pseudo-Marxist supermarket butcher who seems to see alcohol as central to the proletarian revolution, have started to land him in trouble with the police. Meanwhile Colette’s recently widowered older brother is following an equally self-destructive path, having knocked…
