Man Booker Prize Awarded

The Man Booker Prize for Fiction (formerly known as the Booker-McConnell Prize and commonly known simply as the Booker Prize) is a literary prize awarded each year for the best original novel, written in the English language, and published in the UK.

This year, the short list was:

Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Howard Jacobson, J

Neel Mukherjee, The Lives of Others

Ali Smith, How to be both

The winner, announced today is Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

 

Summary:

August, 1943. In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Thai-Burma Death Railway, Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his affair with his uncle’s young wife two years earlier. His life is a daily struggle to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from pitiless beatings. Until he receives a letter that will change him forever.

Moving deftly from the POW camp to contemporary Australia, from the experiences of Dorrigo and his comrades to those of the Japanese guards, this savagely beautiful novel tells a story of love, death, and family, exploring the many forms of good and evil, war and truth, guilt and transcendence, as one man comes of age, prospers, only to discover all that he has lost.