Annal:1982 Man Booker Prize for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Man Booker Prize in the year 1982. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Schindler's Ark: (Schindler's List)
- 1983 LATimes–Fiction winner
- 1982 Booker winner
- Score: 20.33
Schindler’s List is a remarkable work of fiction based on the true story of German industrialist and war profiteer, Oskar Schindler, who, confronted with the horror of the extermination camps, gambled his life and fortune to rescue 1,300 Jews from the gas chambers.
Working with the actual testimony of Schindler’s Jews, Thomas Keneally artfully depicts the courage and shrewdness of an unlikely savior, a man who is a flawed mixture of hedonism and decency and who, in the presence of unutterable evil, transcends the limits of his own humanity.
An Ice-Cream War: A Novel
- 1982 Booker shortlist
- Score: 6.32
1914. In a hotel room in German East Africa, American farmer Walter Smith dreams of Theodore Roosevelt. As he sleeps, a railway passenger swats at flies, regretting her decision to return to the Dark Continent—and to her husband. On a faraway English riverbank, a jealous Felix Cobb watches his brother swim, and curses his sister-in-law-to-be. And in the background of the world’s daily chatter: rumors of an Anglo-German conflict, the likes of which no one has ever seen.
In An Ice-Cream War, William Boyd brilliantly evokes the private dramas of a generation upswept by the winds of war. After his German neighbor burns his crops—with an apology and a smile—Walter Smith takes up arms on behalf of Great Britain. And when Felix’s brother marches off to defend British East Africa, he pursues, against his better judgment, a forbidden love affair. As the sons of the world match wits and weapons on a continent thousands of miles from home, desperation makes bedfellows of enemies and traitors of friends and family. By turns comic and quietly wise, An Ice-Cream War deftly renders lives capsized by violence, chance, and the irrepressible human capacity for love.
The 27th Kingdom: A Novel
- 1982 Booker shortlist
- Score: 6.32
Tucked away in secret chambers in London’s Chelsea is the exquisitely mannered world of a Russian migr and her smugly precious nephew. Their insular existence is soon to be disturbed by a ghostly apparition in the shape of a young postulant on leave from a convent in Wales.
From these strange trappings Alice Thomas Ellis conjures a darkly comic, surprising fable where the everyday and the otherworldly mingle. No writer is more adept at both describing the curtains that decorate our lives and suggesting what’s behind them.
- 1982 Booker shortlist
- Score: 6.32
