Annal:1996 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction

Last Orders: A Novel

Graham Swift

• 1996 Booker winner
• 1996 JT Black-Fiction winner
• 1998 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
• 1996 Whitbread-Novel shortlist
• Score: 32.46

Graham Swift’s first novel since the highly acclaimed Ever After is a subtle yet deeply felt exploration of the ways in which friendship and love are shaped by the past and by fate. At its center is a group of men, friends since the Second World War, whose lives revolve around work, family, the racetrack, and their favorite pub. Now, the death of one of them, and the survivors’ task of driving their friend’s ashes from London to the seaside town where they’ll be scattered, compels them to take stock.

Through conversation and memory they trace the paths they have followed by choice and by accident: through war and its aftermath, through the dramas of their family lives and of their shifting relationships with one another. In brilliantly realized, richly humorous voices, Swift has created a narrative language that perfectly expresses not only the comforts of old habits and friendships but the profound emotional revelations this brief but far-reaching journey will bring them.

Justine

Alice Thompson

• 1996 JT Black-Fiction winner
• Score: 10.46

A challenging, chilling postmodern novel that explores the ill-defined margins between imagination and reality, sanity and madness.

This story of seductive decadence plays on the Marquis de Sade’s work of the same name. It chronicles one man’s obsession with beauty and his journey, through the darkest recesses of the mind, in its pursuit. An unnamed compulsive art collector becomes fascinated by a woman’s portrait, one marked with a simple plaque that reads “Justine.” Searching London for the object of his desire, he finds two women: Justine, a chiseled beauty, and her identical twin, Juliette.

Rich in literary allusion, full of twists and turns, Justine will appeal to readers looking for a challenge and a thrill.