Only the second book in the award’s history to share the winning spot, The English Patient was awarded the Booker Prize in 1992 alongside Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger. Set against the backdrop of the dying hours of the Second World War in an abandoned Italian villa, it’s a story of one man’s fragmentary past framed against the present lives of those swept up and left damaged by war. Told in exquisite prose, The English Patient is a story both of illicit passion and coming to terms with one’s history. ‘This is the best piece of fiction in English I've read in several years’, commented the Independent, ‘throbbing with emotion and humanity.’

The winner of the 1971 Booker Prize, In a Free State is a masterpiece of Post-Colonial fiction. Dennis Potter in the Times described V. S. Naipaul's novel as 'a book of such lucid complexity and such genuine insight, so deft and deep, that it somehow manages to agitate, charm, amuse and excuse the reader all at the same pitch of experience.' A composite of stories, it was originally published as a main novella – telling the story of a couple’s disintegrating marriage set against an odyssey across the brutal backdrop of an imagined African country - framed against two complementary stories of expatriation and displacement. What emerges from the whole is a powerful, overarching picture of fractured identity and uncertain homecoming that spans generations and continents.

Penelope Lively’s seventh novel, Moon Tiger, surprised bookmakers by beating weighty competition from names including Iris Murdoch, Chinua Achebe and Peter Ackroyd to win the Booker Prize in 1987. The novel centres on the life of historian Claudia and, in particular, a brief, life-changing love affair conducted as the coil of Moon Tiger mosquito repellent turns slowly to ash. A wise and moving novel, laced with painful awareness of the all-too-swift passing of time, Moon Tiger is a masterpiece of loss and desire. ‘It's a fine, intelligent piece of work’, praises novelist Anne Tyler, ‘the kind that leaves its traces in the air long after you've put it away'.

Only the second book in the award’s history to share the winning spot, The English Patient was awarded the Booker Prize in 1992 alongside Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger. Set against the backdrop of the dying hours of the Second World War in an abandoned Italian villa, it’s a story of one man’s fragmentary past framed against the present lives of those swept up and left damaged by war. Told in exquisite prose, The English Patient is a story both of illicit passion and coming to terms with one’s history. ‘This is the best piece of fiction in English I've read in several years’, commented the Independent, ‘throbbing with emotion and humanity.’

The bookies favourite from the moment of the Man Booker Prize 2009 longlist announcement, Wolf Hall’s reputation as a masterpiece has only solidified since – cemented by the sequence’s second novel Bring up The Bodies, also winning the prize in 2012. Following the meteoric rise of Thomas Cromwell through the devious machinations of the court of Henry VIII, it’s impossible to imagine a more gripping, moving, thoroughly immersive and wholly believable historical novel. A perfect study of political intrigue, vaulting ambition and real human lives swept up in the relentless turn of the wheel of power.

For at least a month in 2017, probably every one of our staffrooms in the country had a bookseller transfixed by George Saunders’ extraordinary odyssey into the underworld, Lincoln in the Bardo. Abraham Lincoln’s child Willie is dead, sending the President into a spiral of grief. Over the course of a night, Saunders presents a virtuoso battle of the souls as Willie finds himself trapped in a state of limbo between the dead and the living. ‘The novel beats with a present-day urgency,’ noted Vanity Fair, ‘a nation at war with itself, the unbearable grief of a father who has lost a child, and a howling congregation of ghosts, as divided in death as in life, unwilling to move on’.