Books, Movies, & More

Staying on*
By Scott, Paul
1998/10 - University of Chicago Press
0226743497 Find It

In this sequel to "The Raj Quartet", Colonel Tusker and Lucy Smalley stay on in the hills of Pankot after Indian independence deprives them of their colonial status. Finally fed up with accommodating her husband, Lucy claims a degree of independence herself. Eloquent and hilarious, she and Tusker act out class tensions among the British of the Raj and give voice to the loneliness, rage, and stubborn affection in their marriage. "Staying On" won the Booker Prize in 1977 and was made into a motion picture starring Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson in 1979.
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The Sea, the Sea*
By Murdoch, Iris
2001/03 - Penguin Books
014118616X Find It

Charles Arrowby, leading light of England's theatrical set, retires from glittering London to an isolated home by the sea. He plans to write a memoir about his great love affair with Clement Makin, his mentor both professionally and personally, and to amuse himself with Lizzie, an actress he has strung along for many years. None of his plans work out, and his memoir evolves into a riveting chronicle of the strange events and unexpected visitors - some real, some spectral - that disrupt his world and shake his oversized ego to its very core. ...More

Offshore*
By Fitzgerald, Penelope
1998/04 - Mariner Books
0395478049 Find It

On the Battersea Reach of the Thames, a mixed bag of eccentrics lives in houseboats. Belonging to neither land nor sea, they belong to one another. How each of their lives complicates the others is the stuff of this perfect little novel. Winner of a 1997 Booker Prize. ...More

Rites of Passage*
By Golding, William
1980/12 - Farrar Straus Giroux
0374526400 Find It

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Midnight's Children
By Rushdie, Salman
2000/01 - Penguin Books
0140283390 Find It

After the publication of MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN in 1980. Salman Rushdie was awarded the Booker Prize and hailed as the voice of contemporary India. A dense interweaving of narratives, cultures, and voices, Midnight's Children chronicles modern India through the lives of the one thousand and one children born within the country's first hour of independence on August 15, 1947. The protagonist-narrator, Saleem Sinai -- born at the stroke of midnight, the precise moment of India's nationhood -- is celebrated in the press and welcomed by Prime Minister Nehru himself. The coincidence of his birth endows him with telepathic powers that connect him with the other one thousand midnight children, who also possess magical talents. Inextricably linked to his nation, Saleem's story is a whirlwind of disasters and triumphs that mirror the course of modern ...More

Schindler's List
By Keneally, Thomas
1994/09 - Simon & Schuster
0671516884 Find It

In a new hardcover edition, here is the story of how Oskar Schindler, a German-Catholic industrialist, came to save more Jews from the gas chambers than any other single person during WWII. It is the story that Steven Spielberg turned into a seven Academy Award-winning film, and a milestone of Holocaust literature that touches the hearts and provokes the mind of all who read it. Photos throughout. ...More

Life & Times of Michael K*
By Coetzee, J. M.
1993/09 - Penguin Books
0140074481 Find It

In a south Africa turned by war, Michael K. sets out to take his ailing mother back to her rural home. On the way there she dies, leaving him alone in an anarchic world of brutal roving armies. Imprisoned, Michael is unable to bear confinement and escapes, determined to live with dignity. This life affirming novel goes to the center of human experience-the need for an interior, spiritual life; for some connections to the world in which we live; and for purity of vision. ...More

Hotel Du Lac
By Brookner, Anita
1995/10 - Vintage Books USA
0679759328 Find It

In the novel that won her the Booker Prize and established her international reputation, Anita Brookner finds a new vocabulary for framing the eternal question "Why love?" It tells the story of Edith Hope, who writes romance novels under a psudonym. When her life begins to resemble the plots of her own novels, however, Edith flees to Switzerland, where the quiet luxury of the Hotel du Lac promises to resore her to her senses. ...More

The Bone People*
By Hulme, Keri
2005/03 - Louisiana State University Press
0807130729 Find It

Set in the harsh environment of the South Island beaches of New Zealand, this masterful story brings together three singular people in a trinity that reflects their country's varied heritage. Winner of the 1985 Booker-McConnell prize for fiction. ...More

The Old Devils*
By Amis, Kingsley
1994/06 - Dramatic Pub.
0871294079 Find It

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Moon Tiger
By Lively, Penelope
1997/09 - Grove/Atlantic
0802135331 Find It

The last thoughts of a dying writer are captured in this intelligent novel by Booker Prize-winner Penelope Lively. The moving and poignant story of life as a writer, historian, and mother ends as a saga of unfufilled love. ...More

Oscar and Lucinda
By Carey, Peter
1997/11 - Vintage Books USA
0679777504 Find It

The Booker Prize-winning novel--now a major motion picture from Fox Searchlight Pictures.
This sweeping, irrepressibly inventive novel, is a romance, but a romance of the sort that could only take place in nineteenth-century Australia. For only on that sprawling continent--a haven for misfits of both the animal and human kingdoms--could a nervous Anglican minister who gambles on the instructions of the Divine become allied with a teenaged heiress who buys a glassworks to help liberate her sex. And only the prodigious imagination of Peter Carey could implicate Oscar and Lucinda in a narrative of love and commerce, religion and colonialism, that culminates in a half-mad expedition to transport a glass church across the Outback. ...More

The Remains of the Day
By Ishiguro, Kazuo
1990/09 - Tandem Library
0613057708 Find It

A profoundly compelling portrait of the perfect English butler and of his fading insular world in postwar England. "One of the best books of the year".-- The New York Times Book Review. ...More

Possession: A Romance
By Byatt, A. S.
2000/05 - Modern Library
0679640304 Find It

First published in 1990 to wide critical acclaim, and winner of the Booker Prize, "Possession" is both a delicious literary detective story and a triumphant love story. Roland Mitchell is a research assistant obsessed with the Victorian poet, Randolph Henry Ash. When he discovers two of Randolph's letters written to an anonymous woman, he embarks on a detective mission that brings him to Maud Bailey, a fellow academic with literary obsessions of her own. The pair uncover letters, journals, and poems, and follow an exhilarating trail that threatens to unhinge everything they've ever thought about life and Iiterature. What emerges is an extraordinary novel about the intersection of passion and ideas. ...More

The Famished Road*
By Okri, Ben
1993/05 - Anchor Books
0385425139 Find It

Winner - 1991 Booker Award
This phantasmagorical novel is set in the ghetto of an African city during British colonial rule, and follows the story of Azaro--a "spirit-child" who has reneged on a pact with the spirit world--and the travails of his impoverished, beleaguered family. ...More

The English Patient
By Ondaatje, Michael
1992/01 - Vintage Books USA
0679745203 Find It

Winner - 1992 Booker Award
As it traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an abandoned Italian villa at the end of WWII, Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel introduces readers to some of the most fully realized characters in any recent work of fiction. A disturbing and mesmerizing look at loss, danger, and redemption. ...More

Sacred Hunger
By Unsworth, Barry
1993/11 - W. W. Norton & Company
0393311147 Find It

In this Booker Prize-winning work set in colonial America, Unsworth follows the failing fortunes of William Kemp, a merchant pinning his last chance to a slave ship; his son, who needs his father's fortune; and his nephew, who sails on the ill-fated ship. ...More

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
By Doyle, Roddy
1995/01 - Penguin Books
0140233903 Find It

Winner - 1993 Booker Award
In this national bestseller and winner of the Booker Prize, Roddy Doyle, author of the "Barrytown Trilogy", takes us to a new level of emotional richness with the story of ten-year-old Padraic Clarke. Witty and poignant--and adored by critics and readers alike--Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha charts the trumphs, indignities, and bewilderment of Paddy as he tries to make sense of his changing world. print. ...More

How Late It Was, How Late*
By Kelman, James
2005/10 - W. W. Norton & Company
039332799X Find It

Winner - 1994 Booker Award
One Sunday morning in Glasgow, shoplifting ex-con Sammy awakens in an alley, wearing another man's shoes and trying to remember his two-day drinking binge. He gets in a scrap with some soldiers and revives in a jail cell, badly beaten and, he slowly discovers, completely blind. And things get worse: his girlfriend disappears, the police question him for a crime they won't name, and his stab at disability compensation embroils him in the Kafkaesque red tape of the welfare bureaucracy. Told in the utterly uncensored language of the Scottish working class, this is a dark and subtly political parable of struggle and survival, rich with irony and black humor. ...More

The Ghost Road
By Barker, Pat
1996/11 - Plume Books
0452276721 Find It

Winner - 1995 Booker Award
The Ghost Road is the shattering conclusion of Pat barker's brilliant World War I trilogy. Set in the final months of the war, The Ghost Road focuses on Dr. William Rovers, the compassionate psychiatrist of Regeneration and Lt. Billy Prior, last seen as a domestic intelligence agent in The Eye in the Door. "A triumph of imagination".--Publisher's Weekly. ...More

Last Orders*
By Swift, Graham
1997/01 - Vintage Books USA
0679766626 Find It

Winner - 1996 Booker Award
Swift's first novel since his highly acclaimed Ever After is a subtle yet piercing story about 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. When one of the group dies, the survivors are compelled to take stock. ...More

The God of Small Things
By Roy, Arundhati
1998/06 - Harper Perennial
0060977493 Find It

Winner - 1997 Booker Award
"A banquet for all the senses", said "Newsweek" of this bestselling and Booker Prize-winning literary novel--a richly textured first book about the tragic decline of one family whose members suffer the terrible consequences of forbidden love. ...More

Amsterdam
By McEwan, Ian
1999/11 - Anchor Books
0385494246 Find It

Winner - 1998 Booker Award
The wickedly comic Booker Prize winner. On a chilly February day, two old friends meet in the throng outside a crematorium to pay their last respects to the woman who had been a lover to both of them. In the days that follow the funeral, Clive and Vernon will make a pact that will have consequences that neither man could have foreseen. ...More

Disgrace
By Coetzee, J. M.
1999/11 - Viking Books
0670887315 Find It

Winner - 1999 Booker Award
Winner - 2001 ALA Notable Fiction Selection
-- Disgrace -- one of only four works of fiction -- was chosen by the editors of the New York Times Book Review as one of the eleven Best Books of the Year
-- A New York Times, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Newsday, New York Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Village Voice Literary Supplement, Wordstock, Ingrain, and Independent bestseller
-- A Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and QuaLity Paperback Book Club
-- A finalist for The National Book Critics Circle Awards
-- Coetzee is the only writer to have been awarded the Booker Prize twice ...More

The Blind Assassin
By Atwood, Margaret
2000/09 - Nan A. Talese
0385475721 Find It

Winner - 2000 Booker Award
Winner - 2001 ALA Notable Fiction Selection
Containing a novel within a novel, "The Blind Assassin" is a science fiction story told by two unnamed lovers who meet in dingy backstreet rooms. Told in a style that magnificently captures the colloquialisms of the 1930s and 1940s, it unfolds layer by astonishing layer and concludes in a brilliant and wonderfully satisfying twist. ...More

True History of the Kelly Gang
By Carey, Peter
2001/02 - Knopf
0375410848 Find It

Winner - 2001 Booker Award
Winner - 2002 ALA Notable Fiction Selection
Speaking from the grave, out of 19th century Australia rides a hero of his people--Ned Kelly--a mythic outlaw whose life embodies tragedy, perseverance, and freedom. Executed more than a century ago, he resonates still as that country's most potent legend, now brought to life by the award-winning author of "Oscar & Lucinda". ...More

Life of Pi
By Martel, Yann
2003/05 - Harvest Books
0156027321 Find It

A BookPage Notable Title
This brilliant novel combines the delight of Kipling's "Just So Stories" with the metaphysical adventure of "Jonah and the Whale, " as Pi, the son of a zookeeper, is marooned aboard a lifeboat with four wild animals. His knowledge and cunning allow him to coexist for 227 days with Richard Parker, a 450-pound Bengal tiger. ...More

Vernon God Little*
By Pierre, D. B. C.
2004/06 - Harvest/HBJ Book
0156029987 Find It

"If Huckleberry Finn were set on the Mexican-American border and written by the creators of South Park, it might read something like this."-San Francisco Chronicle

When sixteen kids are shot on high school grounds, everyone looks for someone to blame. Meet Vernon Little, under arrest at the sheriff's office, a teenager wearing nothing but yesterday's underwear and his prized logo sneakers. Moments after the shooter, his best buddy, turns the gun on himself, Vernon is pinned as an accomplice. Out for revenge are the townspeople, the cable news networks, and Deputy Vaine Gurie, a woman whose zeal for the Pritikin diet is eclipsed only by her appetite for barbecued ribs from the Bar-B-Chew Barn. So Vernon does what any red-blooded American teenager would do; he takes off for Mexico.
Vernon God Little is a provocatively satirical, rio ...More

Line of Beauty
By Hollinghurst, Alan
2004/10 - Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
1582345082 Find It

Winner - 2004 Booker Award
A BookPage Notable Title
This emotionally charged, disarmingly comic novel weaves the tale of a 20-year-old's private pursuit of beauty as expressed through his dangerous yet rewarding love affairs with a young black clerk and a Lebanese millionaire as he navigates within a world driven by rising fortunes, politics and money, and power and riches in 1980s Britain. ...More

The Sea
By Banville, John
2005/11 - Alfred A. Knopf
0307263118 Find It

Winner - 2005 Booker Award
When Max Morden returns to the coastal town where he spent a holiday in his youth he is both escaping from a recent loss and confronting a distant trauma. The Grace family appear that long ago summer as if from another world. Drawn to the Grace twins, Chloe and Myles, Max soon finds himself entangled in their lives, which are as seductive as they are unsettling. What ensues will haunt him for the rest of his years and shape everything that is to follow. ...More

The Inheritance of Loss
By Desai, Kiran
2005/11 - Atlantic Monthly Press
0871139294 Find It

Winner - 2007 ALA Notable Fiction Selection
The author of the acclaimed Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard takes readers to the northeastern Himalayas where a rising insurgency in Nepal challenges the old way of life--and opens up a grasping world of conflicting desires. ...More

The Gathering
By Enright, Anne
2007/09 - Black Cat
9780802170392 Find It

BookPage Notable Title
Winner - 2007 Booker Award
Anne Enright is a dazzling writer of international stature and one of Ireland's most singular voices. Now she delivers The Gathering, a moving, evocative portrait of a large Irish family and a shot of fresh blood into the Irish literary tradition, combining the lyricism of the old with the shock of the new. ...More