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.

Rites of Passage kicks off the 1980s by taking us back in time to the start of the nineteenth century. The aristocratic Edmund Talbot embarks upon a long voyage to Australia, and keeps a journal to amuse his godfather back home in England. In cramped quarters on a dilapidated warship, he recounts tales of the ship’s varied inhabitants from all classes of society, in a witty and extremely lively narrative that prods and interrogates the structures and conflicts of the English class system in microcosm.