Annal:2003 Man Booker Prize for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Man Booker Prize in the year 2003. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Vernon God Little: A 21st Century Comedy in the Presence of Death
- 2003 Booker winner
- 2003 Whitbread-1st Novel winner
- Score: 20.53
In the town jail of Martirio, Texas — under the terrifying care of the dynastic Gurie family, and wearing only his New Jack trainers and underpants — fifteen-year-old Vernon Little is in trouble. His friend has just blown away sixteen of his classmates before turning the gun on himself. And Vernon has become the focus of the whole town’s need for vengeance, and the media’s appetite for sensational content — true or not. When the tricky Mr. Lesdema arrives in town — with a covert mission to promote himself from TV repairman to crack CNN reporter — Vernon thinks he…
Brick Lane: A Novel
- 2004 Kiriyama-Fiction finalist
- 2003 Booker shortlist
- 2003 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- 2003 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 24.54
Monica Ali’s gorgeous first novel is the deeply moving story of one woman, Nazneen, born in a Bangladeshi village and transported to London at age eighteen to enter into an arranged marriage. Already hailed by the London Observer as “one of the most significant British novelists of her generation,” Ali has written a stunningly accomplished debut about one outsider’s quest to find her voice.
Vivid, profoundly humane, and beautifully rendered, Brick Lane captures a world at once unimaginable and achingly familiar. And it establishes Monica Ali as a thrilling new voice in fiction. As Kirkus Reviews said, “She is one of those dangerous writers who see everything.”
Oryx and Crake: A Novel
- 2004 Orange shortlist
- 2003 Booker shortlist
- 2003 Giller Prize shortlist
- 2003 Governor General's finalists
- Score: 24.54
A stunning and provocative new novel by the internationally celebrated author of The Blind Assassin, winner of the Booker Prize, Margaret Atwood’s new novel is so utterly compelling, so prescient, so relevant, so terrifyingly-all-too-likely-to-be-true, that readers may find their view of the world forever changed after reading it. With breathtaking command of her shocking material and with her customary sharp wit and dark humour, Atwood projects us into a conceivable future of our own world, an outlandish yet wholly believable place left devastated in the wake of scientific disaster and populated by characters who will continue to inhabit your dreams long after the book is closed.
- 2005 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 2003 Booker shortlist
- Score: 12.55
A taut, intense tale of the dashed hopes of the post-apartheid era and the small betrayals that doom a friendship, The Good Doctor is an extraordinary parable of the corruption of the flesh and spirit. It assures Damon Galgut’s place as a major international talent. When Laurence Waters arrives at his new post at a deserted rural hospital, staff physician Frank Eloff is instantly suspicious. Laurence is everything Frank is not—young, optimistic, and full of big ideas. The whole town is beset with new arrivals and the return of old faces. Frank…
What Was She Thinking?: Notes on a Scandal: A Novel
- 2003 Booker shortlist
- Score: 6.53
Schoolteacher Barbara Covett has known none but the most solitary of lifestyles until Sheba Hart joins St. George’s. Starting by sharing lunches, then family events, the new art teacher draws Barbara into a touching confidence. Unbeknownst to their colleagues, however, another relationship blossoms meanwhile: Sheba has begun a passionate affair with an underage male student. When the details come to light and Sheba falls prey to the inevitable media circus, Barbara decides to write an account in her friend’s defense—revealing not only Sheba’s secrets but her own.
Astonishing Splashes of Colour
- 2003 Booker shortlist
- Score: 6.53
“When is the right time to tell someone they’re not who they think they are?” Caught in an over-vivid world as a result of synaesthesia (a condition in which emotions are seen as colours), Kitty Wellington is tipped off-centre by the loss of a child. And as children all around become emblems of hope and longing and grief, she’s made shockingly aware of the real reasons for her pervasive sense of her own “non-existence.”
What mystery at the heart of Kitty’s family makes her four older brothers so vague about her mother’s life? And why does her artist father…
