The Man Booker Prize 2004
19 October 2004

The Shortlist



Bitter Fruit by Achmat Dangor
The last time Silas Ali encountered Lieutenant Du Boise, Silas was locked in the back of a police van and the Lieutenant was conducting a vicious assault on his wife Lydia, in revenge for her husband’s ANC activities. When Silas sees him again, by chance, twenty years later, as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is due to deliver its report, crimes from the past erupt into the present, splintering the Alis' fragile family life.

Bitter Fruit is the story of Silas, Mikey and Lydia, a brittle family in a dysfunctional society. By turns harrowing, erotic and fearlessly satirical, it is a portrait of modern South Africa that also addresses questions of universal significance.



The Electric Michelangelo by Sarah Hall
Opening in the seaside resort of Morecambe Bay during its early 1900s heyday, The Electric Michelangelo chronicles the remarkable life of Cy Parks. Spending his childhood helping his eccentric mother Reeda run her macabre guest house, he is then apprenticed to Eliot Riley, the greatest tattoo artist in the northern counties, from whom he learns his strange folk craft.

After a decade of abuse and in the wake of Riley’s violent death, Cy flees to America, where he sets up his own business on the infamous Coney Island boardwalk. In this riotous carnival environment of roller-coasters and freak shows, while the crest of the amusement industry wave is breaking, Cy becomes enamoured with Grace, a mysterious European immigrant and circus performer, who commissions him to cover her body entirely with tattooed eyes. Hugely atmospheric, anecdotal and historical, Sarah Hall’s second novel casts an imaginative spell of local colour and lyrical prose.



The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
It is the summer of 1983, and young Nick Guest has moved into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: Gerald, an ambitious new Tory MP, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their children Toby and Catherine. As the boom-years of the mid-80s unfold, Nick, an innocent in matters of politics and money, becomes caught up in the Feddens' world, with its grand parties, its holidays in the Dordogne, its parade of monsters both comic and threatening. In an era of endless possibility, Nick finds himself able to pursue his own private obsession, with beauty - a prize as compelling to him as power and riches are to his friends. An affair with a young black clerk gives him his first experience of romance; but it is a later affair, with a beautiful millionaire, that will change his life more drastically and bring into question the larger fantasies of a ruthless decade.



Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
In a bold and unconventionally structured work, David Mitchell combines the stories of six individuals to create a masterful whole, which is both thought provoking and incredibly exhilarating.

The morality and ambitions of a reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan’s California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; a genetically modified ‘dinery server’ on death-row; and Zachry, a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisation echo and impact on each others stories and point to a terrifying vision of the world’s future and challenges our ability to shape not only our destiny but those that will come after us.



The Master by Colm Tóibín
In The Master, Colm Tóibín tells the story of Henry James, an American-born genius of the modern novel who became a connoisseur of exile, living among artists and aristocrats in Paris, Rome, Venice and London.

In January 1895 James anticipates the opening of his first play in London. He has never been so vulnerable, nor felt so deeply unsuited to the public gaze. When the production fails, he returns, chastened, to his writing desk. The result is a string of masterpieces, but they are produced at a high personal cost.

Colm Tóibín captures the exquisite anguish of a man whose artistic gifts made his career a triumph but whose private life was haunted by loneliness and longing, and whose sexual identity remained unresolved. Henry James circulated in the grand parlours and palazzos of Europe, he was lauded and admired, yet his attempts at intimacy inevitably failed him and those he tried to love.



I’ll Go to Bed at Noon by Gerard Woodward
Colette Jones has had drink problems in the past, but now it seems as though her whole family is in danger of turning to alcohol. Her oldest son has thrown away a promising musical career for a job behind the counter in builders’ merchants, and his drinking sprees with his brother-in-law Bill, a pseudo-Marxist supermarket butcher who seems to see alcohol as central to the proletarian revolution, have started to land him in trouble with the police.

Meanwhile Colette’s recently widowered older brother is following an equally self-destructive path, having knocked back an entire cellar of homemade wine, he’s now on the gin, a bottle a day and counting. Who will be next? Her youngest son had decided to run away to sea, but when her own husband hits the bottle Colette realises she has to act.

As the pressure builds on Colette to cope with these damaged people, her own weaknesses begin to emerge, and become crucial to the outcome of all their lives.