Annal:1999 Man Booker Prize for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Man Booker Prize in the year 1999. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 1999 Booker winner
- 1999 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 16.49
From the author of Waiting for the Barbarians and the Booker-Prize-winning Life & Times of Michael K, a dazzling new novel—his first in five years
Disgrace—set in post-apartheid Cape Town and on a remote farm in the Eastern Cape—is deft, lean, quiet, and brutal. A heartbreaking novel about a man and his daughter, Disgrace is a portrait of the new South Africa that is ultimately about grace and love.
At fifty-two Professor David Lurie is divorced, filled with desire but lacking in passion. An affair with one of his students leaves him…
- 1999 Booker shortlist
- Score: 6.49
Anita Desai’s new book, hailed as “unsparing, yet tender and funny,”* brilliantly confirms her place among today’s foremost Indian writers. Fasting, Feasting takes on Desai’s greatest theme: the intricate, delicate web of family conflict. It tells the moving story of Uma, the plain older daughter of an Indian family, tied to the household of her childhood and tending to her parents’ every extravagant demand, and of her younger brother, Arun, across the world in Massachusetts, bewildered by his new life in college and the suburbs, where he lives with the…
Headlong: A Novel
- 1999 Booker shortlist
- 1999 JT Black-Fiction shortlist
- 1999 Whitbread-Novel shortlist
- Score: 18.49
An unlikely con man wagers wife, wealth, and sanity in pursuit of an elusive Old Master.
Invited to dinner by the boorish local landowner, Martin Clay, an easily distracted philosopher, and his art-historian wife are asked to assess three dusty paintings blocking the draught from the chimney. But hiding beneath the soot is nothing less-Martin believes-than a lost work by Bruegel. So begins a hilarious trail of lies and concealments, desperate schemes and soaring hopes as Martin, betting all that he owns and much that he doesn’t, embarks on a quest to prove…
- 2001 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 1999 Booker shortlist
- 1999 Whitbread-1st Novel shortlist
- Score: 18.51
Hugh Bawn was a modern hero, a dreamer, a Socialist, a man of the people who revolutionized Scotland’s residential development after World War II. Now he lies dying on the eighteenth floor of one of the flats he built, flats that are being demolished along with the idealism he inherited from his mother. Hugh’s final months are plagued by memory and loss, by bitter feelings about his family and the country that could not live up to the housing constructed for it. His grandson, Jamie, comes home to watch over his dying mentor and sees in the man and in the land…
- 1999 Booker shortlist
- Score: 6.49
At either end of the twentieth century, two women fall in love with men outside their familiar worlds. In 1901, Anna Winterbourne, recently widowed, leaves England for Egypt, an outpost of the Empire roiling with nationalist sentiment. Far from the comfort of the British colony, she finds herself enraptured by the real Egypt and in love with Sharif Pasha al-Baroudi. Nearly a hundred years later, Isabel Parkman, a divorced American journalist and descendant of Anna and Sharif has fallen in love with Omar al-Ghamrawi, a gifted and difficult Egyptian-American…
The Blackwater Lightship: A Novel
- 2001 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 1999 Booker shortlist
- Score: 12.51
A beautifully written, deeply resonant story about three generations of an estranged family reuniting to mourn a tragic, untimely death—from the author Nick Hornby called “one of the most promising novelists writing in the English language.”
It is Ireland in the early 1990s. Helen, her mother Lily, and her grandmother Dora have come together, after a decade of estrangement, to tend to Helen’s beloved brother, Declan, who is dying of AIDS. Under the crumbling roof of Dora’s old house in Ireland, Declans’ two friends join the women as each waits for the end.…
