2005 Man Booker Prize for Fiction (Longlist)
Explore the 2005 Man Booker Prize for Fiction longlist, featuring the year's most acclaimed novels. Discover the top literary contenders that captivated readers and critics alike.
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The Harmony Silk Factory
by Tash Aw
Aw's highly original first novel juxtaposes three accounts of the life of an enigmatic man at a pivotal and haunting moment in Malaysian history.
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The Sea
by John Banville
Following the death of his wife, Max Morden retreats to the seaside town of his childhood summers, where his own life becomes inextricably entwined with the members of the vacationing Grace family.
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Arthur & George
by Julian Barnes
Tells the alliance of George, the son of a Midlands vicar, and Arthur a shabby genteel Edinburgh, their adventures, triumphs, and set-backs.
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A Long Long Way
by Sebastian Barry
Leaving behind his family in Dublin in order to join the Allied forces during World War I, eighteen-year-old Willie Dunne survives the horrors of war, but his return home is devastated by political tensions in Ireland.
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Slow Man
by J. M. Coetzee
Dependent on others after losing his leg in an accident, sixty-year-old Paul Rayment finds himself falling in love with a down-to-earth Croatian nurse and encouraged by a mysterious writer to take an activist role in his own life.
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In the Fold
by Rachel Cusk
Returning to the site of a garden party where he made some lasting friendships, Michael hopes to escape his troubled marriage and brings along his taciturn young son, but discovers the place to be fraught with long-standing deceptions.
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Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro
A reunion with two childhood friends draws Kathy and her companions on a nostalgic odyssey into their lives at Hailsham, an isolated private school in the English countryside, and a confrontation with the truth about their childhoods.
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A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian
by Marina Lewycka
Two feuding sisters must put aside their differences to protect their father from a gold-digging Ukrainian divorcée.
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Beyond Black
by Hilary Mantel
Trouble spirals out of control for a psychic and her personal assistant when they take up with a spirit guide and his drowned therapist after moving to a suburban wasteland.
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Saturday
by ian mcewan
A successful, happily married neurosurgeon, Henry Perowne is drawn into a confrontation with Baxter, a small-time thug, following a minor motor vehicle accident on the way to his regular squash game, an encounter that has savage consequences when Baxter, believing that the doctor has humiliated him, visits the Perowne home that evening during a family reunion. 400,000 first printing.
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Shalimar the Clown
by Salman Rushdie
In this gripping international tale of love and revenge, and the ancient and modern conflicts from which they spring, a murder looks at first like a political assassination, but turns out to be passionately personal.
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The Accidental
by Ali Smith
Talking her way into the Norfolk cottage that the Smart family is renting for the summer, Amber, an enigmatic con artist, insinuates herself into the lives of Eve, her husband Michael, and their children.
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On Beauty
by Zadie Smith
Struggling with a stale marriage and the misguided passions of his three adult children, long-suffering art professor Howard Belsey finds his family life thrown into turmoil by his son's engagement to the socially prominent daughter of a right-wing icon. By the author of White Teeth. 200,000 first printing.
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This is the Country
by William Wall
In an Ireland far removed from the popular images in travel brochures, a bright teenager is heading for trouble - skipping school and taking drugs, his life changes when his girlfriend tells him she's pregnant. But, as he tries to make to transition to being a father, his past catches up with him once more.