The Man Booker Prize, which celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2008, "aims to reward the best novel of the year written by a citizen of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland." The Man Booker judges are selected from the country's finest critics, writers and academics to maintain the consistent excellence of the prize.  The winner of the Man Booker Prize receives £50,000 and both the winner and the shortlisted authors are guaranteed a worldwide readership plus a dramatic increase in book sales.

• THE COMFORT OF STRANGERS by Ian McEwan

  Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1981: As their holiday unfolds, Colin and Maria are locked into their own intimacy. They groom themselves meticulously, as though someone is waiting for them who cares deeply about how they appear. When they meet a man with a disturbing story to tell, they become drawn into a fantasy of violence and obsession.
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• SMALL WORLD by David Lodge

  Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1984: The unbridled greed, pettiness, buffoonery and intellectual gobbledygook in the world of higher scholarship are the topics of this thorough and thoroughly funny roman a' English department. It's interesting for a couple of reasons, aside from its humor and spoofiness: it's an insider's view of things -- always the best kind -- and it takes its old-fashioned time telling a story, complete with reasonable digressions about the state of literary criticism and what may or may not be a realistic view of the academic life.
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• THE REMAINS OF THE DAY by Kazuo Ishiguro

  Booker Prize Winner, 1989: The novel's narrator, Stevens, is a perfect English butler who tries to give his narrow existence form and meaning through the self-effacing, almost mystical practice of his profession. In a career that spans the second World War, Stevens is oblivious of the real life that goes on around him -- oblivious, for instance, of the fact that his aristocrat employer is a Nazi sympathizer. Still, there are even larger matters at stake in this heartbreaking, pitch-perfect novel -- namely, Stevens' own ability to allow some bit of life-affirming love into his tightly repressed existence.
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• THE BOOK OF EVIDENCE by John Banville

  Booker Prize Finalist, 1989: Freddie Montgomery is a schizophrenic 38-year-old ex-scientist haunting dingy pubs who, nonetheless, ponders life and his illness via this superb novelized murder trial "confession." After study in America, Freddie returns to Ireland to find that his disowning mother has sold what he believes is part of his inheritance from his late father, some paintings that include an old Dutch master of a woman he thinks regards him with caring, benevolent authority. As he steals it, he murders a maid who catches him in the act. His lawyer advises him to plead manslaughter to quash evidence. Instead, the brooding, contradictory Freddie writes the "book of evidence" that we read. How much of it is true, how much sick fancy? Freddie makes us think, too. - Kenneth Mintz, formerly with Bayonne P.L., N.J.
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• QUARANTINE by Jim Crace

  Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, 1997: Two thousand years ago four travellers enter the Judean desert to fast and pray for their lost souls. In the blistering heat and barren rocks they encounter the evil merchant Musa - madman, sadist, rapist, even a Satan - who holds them in his tyrannical power. Yet there is another, a faint figure in the distance, fasting for forty days, a Galilean who they say has the power to work miracles…Here, trapped in the wilderness, their terrifying battle for survival begins.
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• DISGRACE by JM Coetzee
  

  Winner the Booker Prize, 1999: Refusing to apologise after an impulsive affair with a student, David Lurie, a 52 year old professor in Cape Town, seeks refuge on his daughter’s farm where a savage and disturbing attack brings into relief the faults in their relationship. Pitching the moral code of political correctness against the values of Romantic poetry, Disgrace examines dichotomies both in personal relationships and in the unaccountability of one culture towards another.
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