After the Seventies saw the Booker taking its tentative first steps, stumbling here and there, occasionally landing on a genuine classic but more often than not serving up curiosities rather than solid-gold genius, we venture into more solid ground in the Eighties.

There’s a sense here of more self-awareness, of the need for winners to feel “important” and make a statement of some kind. There are certainly more hits than misses, and even the latter are perhaps in some ways more interesting than those of the previous decade.

On her deathbed, popular historian and journalist Claudia Hampton decides to write “a history of the world,” which turns out to be a kaleidoscopic reflection on her own life, going back and forth in time anchored around the loss of the great love of her life, a soldier called Tom who she meets in 1942 Egypt. The titular “moon tiger” is a mosquito repellant device, “a green coil that slowly burns all night… dropping away into lengths of grey ash” - present at a pivotal (and ultimately, final) moment in her relationship with Tom, and its “glowing red eye” is a light that she’s unable to look away from, returning to it time and again throughout the novel.