Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

This prize winning sequel to the author's acclaimed masterpiece of antiwar literature, Regeneration, "calls to mind . . . Hemingway and Fitzgerald" (Boston Globe) and stands on its own as an eloquently and morally complex novel of the brutal effects of World War I on the human psyche and British society as a whole.

Fingersmith

by Sarah Waters

In Victorian England, an orphan girl is sent to a country estate to work for-and ultimately woo-its young heiress, on behalf of a mysterious benefactor known as Gentleman.

Carry Me Down

by M. J. Hyland

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 a "log of lies." 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 a boy so young. With an obsession for the Guinness Book of Records , a keenly inquisitive mind, and a kind of faith, John remains hopeful despite the... (more)

Staying On: A Novel (Phoenix Fiction Series)

Staying On: A Novel (Phoenix Fiction Series)

by Paul Scott, Geraldine James

Instead of returning “home” when he retired, Tusker, once a Colonel in the British Army, and his wife Lily chose to remain in the small hill town of Pangkot with its eccentric inhabitants and archaic rituals left over from the days of the Empire.

Bone People, the

by Keri Hulme

"This is not just a novel: it's a boggle-the-mind experience."

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.

by Roddy Doyle

The Bottle Factory Outing

by Beryl Bainbridge

Freda and Brenda spend their days working in an Italian-run wine- bottling factory. A work outing offers promise for Freda, and terror for Brenda, passions run high on that chilly day of freedom, and life after the outing never returns to normal.

G.: A Novel

by John Berger

This novel centres on G, who seems impervious to everything around him. His interests are purely sexual, his crowning ideal fulfilment. Yet, in the end this is enough for the politics of desire to expose the criminal politics of oppression. John Berger is the author of "To The Wedding".

The Sea

by John (Signed) Banville

Empire of the Sun: Book 1

Empire of the Sun

by J. G. Ballard

The classic, award-winning novel, made famous by Steven Spielberg's film, tells of a young boy's struggle to survive World War II in China. Jim is separated from his parents in a world at war. To survive, he must find a strength greater than all the events that surround him. Shanghai, 1941 -- a city aflame from the fateful torch of Pearl Harbor. In streets full of chaos and corpses, a young British boy searches... (more)

Possession

by Antonia S. Byatt, Jean-Louis Chevalier

Tree of Smoke: A Novel

by Denis Johnson

Winner of the National Book Award One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year Named a Best Book of the Year by Time , The Washington Post , The Boston Globe , Chicago Tribune , San Francisco Chronicle , Amazon.com, Salon , Slate , The National Book Critics Circle, The Christian Science Monitor. . . . Tree of Smoke is the story of William "Skip" Sands, CIA--engaged in Pschological... (more)

THE SEA

by John Banville

When art historian Max Morden returns to the seaside village where he once spent a childhood holiday, he is both escaping from a recent loss and confronting a distant trauma. The Grace family had appeared that long-ago summer as if from another world. Mr and Mrs Grace, with their worldly ease and candour, were unlike any adults he had met before. But it was his contemporaries, the Grace twins Myles and Chloe, who... (more)

Saville

by David Storey

How the Light Gets in

by M. J. Hyland

Lou Connor, a gifted but unhappy sixteen-year-old, is desperate to escape her life of poverty in Sydney, Australia. When she is offered a place as an exchange student at a college in Illinois, it seems as if her dreams are going to be fulfilled. Her host family, the Hardings, has a large and beautiful house in Illinois and couldn't be more welcoming. Everything is perfect. Until Lou starts having to live in the... (more)

The Conservationist

by Nadine Gordimer

The winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature paints a fascinating portrait of a "conservationist" left only with the possibility of self-preservation, a subtle and detailed study of the forces and relationships that seethe in South Africa today. 6 cassettes.

The Idea of Perfection

by Kate Grenville

Harley Savage is a plain woman, a part-time museum curator and quilting expert with three failed marriages and a heart condition. Douglas Cheeseman is a shy, gawky engineer with jug-handle ears, one marriage gone sour, and a crippling lack of physical courage. They meet in the little Australian town of Karakarook, where Harley has arrived to help the town build a heritage museum and Douglas to demolish the quaint... (more)

Unless: A Novel

by Carol Shields

Reta Winters, 44-year-old successful author of lightsummertime fiction, has always considered herself happy, even blessed. That is, until her oldest daughter Norah mysteriously drops out of college to become a panhandler on a Toronto street corner -- silent, with a sign around her neck bearing the word "Goodness".

The Untouchable (Vintage International)

by John Banville

One of the most dazzling and adventurous writers now working in English takes on the enigma of the Cambridge spies in a novel of exquisite menace, biting social comedy, and vertiginous moral complexity. The narrator is the elderly Victor Maskell, formerly of British intelligence, for many years art expert to the Queen. Now he has been unmasked as a Russian agent and subjected to a disgrace that is almost a kind of... (more)

The Emperor's Children

by Claire Messud

The Emperor’s Children is a richly drawn, brilliantly observed novel of fate and fortune—about the intersections in the lives of three friends, now on the cusp of their thirties, making their way--and not-- in New York City. In this tour de force, the celebrated author Claire Messud brings to life a city, a generation, and the way we live in this moment.

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Browse Subjects: booker prize

Top Books

by Pat Barker

by Sarah Waters

by M. J. Hyland

by Paul Scott, Geraldine James

by Keri Hulme

by Roddy Doyle

by Beryl Bainbridge

by John Berger

by John (Signed) Banville

by J. G. Ballard

by Antonia S. Byatt, Jean-Louis Chevalier

by Denis Johnson

by John Banville

by David Storey

by M. J. Hyland

by Nadine Gordimer

by Kate Grenville

by Carol Shields

by John Banville

by Claire Messud