Annal:2006 Man Booker Prize for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Man Booker Prize in the year 2006. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
The Inheritance of Loss: A Novel
- 2006 Booker winner
- 2006 NBCC–Fiction winner
- 2007 Orange shortlist
- 2006 Kiriyama-Fiction finalist
- Score: 32.56
Kiran Desai’s first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, was published to unanimous acclaim in over twenty-two countries. Now Desai takes us to the northeastern Himalayas where a rising insurgency challenges the old way of life.
In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga lives an embittered old judge who wants to retire in peace when his orphaned granddaughter Sai arrives on his doorstep. The judge’s chatty cook watches over her, but his thoughts are mostly with his son, Biju, hopscotching from one New York restaurant job to…
- 2006 Booker shortlist
- Score: 6.56
The Orange Prize-winning author Kate Grenville recalls her family’s history in an astounding novel about the pioneers of New South Wales. Already a best seller in Australia, The Secret River is the story of Grenville’s ancestors, who wrested a new life from the alien terrain of Australia and its native people. London, 1806. William Thornhill, a Thames bargeman, is deported to the New South Wales colony in what would become Australia. In this new world of convicts and charlatans, Thornhill tries to pull his family into a position of power and comfort. When…
- 2006 Booker shortlist
- Score: 6.56
Carry Me Down is an engrossing story that at its heart examines an adolescent’s difficulties navigating the world. John Egan is a misfit — a twelve-year-old in the body of a grown man with the voice of a giant — who diligently keeps track of the lies large and small that are told to him. John’s been able to detect lies for as long as he can remember; it’s a source of power but also great consternation for someone so young. With an obsession for the Guinness Book of World Records, a keenly inquisitive mind, and a kind of faith, John remains hopeful despite…
Mother's Milk: A Novel
- 2006 Booker shortlist
- Score: 6.56
Writing with the scathing wit and bright perceptiveness for which he has become known, celebrated English author Edward St. Aubyn creates a complex family portrait that examines the shifting allegiances between mothers, sons, and husbands. The novel’s perspective ricochets among all members of the Melrose family—the family featured in St. Aubyn’s widely praised trilogy, Some Hope—starting with Robert, who provides an exceptionally droll and convincing account of being born; to Patrick, a hilariously churlish husband who has been sexually abandoned by his…
- 2006 Booker shortlist
- 2006 JT Black-Fiction shortlist
- 2006 Orange shortlist
- Score: 18.56
Moving back through the 1940s, through air raids, blacked-out streets, illicit liasons, and sexual adventure, to end with its beginning in 1941, The Night Watch tells the story of Londoners: three women and a young man with a past-whose lives, and those of their friends and lovers, connect in ways that are surprising not always known to them. In wartime London, the women work-as ambulance drivers, ministry clerks, and building inspectors. There are feats of heroism, epic and quotidian, and tragedies both enormous and personal, but the emotional interiors…
In the Country of Men: A Novel
- 2007 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- 2006 Booker shortlist
- Score: 12.57
Libya, 1979. Nine-year-old Suleiman’s days are circumscribed by the narrow rituals of childhood: outings to the ruins surrounding Tripoli, games with friends, exotic gifts from his father’s business trips. But his nights have come to revolve around his mother’s increasingly disturbing bedside stories full of old family bitterness. And then one day Suleiman sees his father across the square, his face wrapped in a pair of dark sunglasses. Wasn’t he supposed to be away on business yet again? Why is he going into that strange building with the green shutters? Why did he lie?
Suleiman is soon caught up in a world he cannot hope to understand—where the sound of the telephone ringing becomes a portent of grave danger; where his mother frantically burns his father’s cherished books; where a stranger full of sinister questions sits outside in a parked car all day; where his best friend’s father can disappear overnight, next to be seen publicly interrogated on state television.
