10-1!

10. A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James (2015) - 9
(GoodReads ranking: 21, equivalent score 8)

A book that’s sort of about Bob Marley, but more honestly about Jamaica, contains many more than seven killings and is both very long and very tough-going.  How does it make my top ten? It’s partly because it is such a virtuoso performance. The range of voices James inhabits is dizzying and disorienting at the time of reading, but profoundly impressive in retrospect. It’s also the joy of a challenge completed. If that makes it sound off-putting, it shouldn’t, because while it is far from easy-going, it’s punctuated by enough awe-inspiring moments of insight, emotion and even humour to keep the long and sometimes challenging journey entertaining and worthwhile.

9. Moon Tiger, Penelope Lively (1987) - 9
(GoodReads ranking: 19, equivalent score 8)

Something of an underrated gem, I feel.  Lively’s short book is posited as a “history of everything”, which it both obviously isn’t and also sort of is – albeit one told through the intrigung eyes of a flawed yet magnetic central character. It’s a tough novel to fully explain but it’s super-short so just go and read it yeah?

8. The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst (2004) - 9
(GoodReads ranking: 32, equivalent score 7.5)

An old favourite of mine but still one that stands up.  Hollinghurst writes beautifully, and this aesthetically-fixated (yet by no means superficial) novel is a triumph of both style and substance.  It’s a recent historical novel, looking back at the 80s AIDS crisis with a mixture of nostalgia and inevitable sadness.

7. Girl, Woman, Other, Bernardine Evaristo (2019) - 9
(GoodReads ranking: 3, equivalent score 8.5)

Evaristo’s book so obviously deserved to be 2019’s outright winner, rather than sharing it with Atwood. While it’s squarely focused on the experience of black female-identifying characters, there’s so many different stories in here that there’s something for everyone to enjoy and identify with.

6. Shuggie Bain, Douglas Stuart (2020) – 9.5
(GoodReads ranking: 2, equivalent score 8.5)

Stuart’s debut novel draws on his own life to paint a heartbreaking picture of the tribulations of growing up “different” in a working-class Glasgow. Some of the subject matter reads in summary like cliché, but it’s brought to life in a way that’s anything but.

5. The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan (2014) – 9.5
(GoodReads ranking: 11, equivalent score 8)

Another book that manages to make the darkest of subject matter – in this case the horrors of hard labour on the Burma Death Railway during WW2 – somehow poetic and beautiful.  Flanagan’s sparse, economical style is the big draw here, but it’s also thematically rich and nuanced in its presentation of its many characters and their many flaws.

4. Disgrace, J. M. Coetzee (1999) – 9.5
(GoodReads ranking: 27, equivalent score 7.5)

A brutal novel told from the perspective of a practically irredeemably flawed man, Disgrace is unflinchingly honest and as such far from the easiest read on this list.  Like Coetzee’s earlier winner, it employs precise, well-constructed prose to keep you reading in spite of its lack of hope, unable to look away from the unfolding horror. It’s more complex and nuanced than its predecessor though, with a huge amount to pick over and think about.

3. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie (1981) – 9.5
(GoodReads ranking: 12, equivalent score 8)

Rushdie’s postcolonial / magic realist epic dragged the Booker’s by now tired depictions of India (previously unhealthily obsessed with Britain’s declining role in the world) kicking and screaming into the modern world, with a kaleidoscopically vivid ride through the history of India as an independent nation, told through the eyes (and nose) of the magnificent central character Saleem. It’s been voted the best Booker winner not once but twice, and is a titan not only of Booker history but of twentieth century fiction in general.

2. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro (1989) – 9.5
(GoodReads ranking: 7, equivalent score 8.5)

Another all-time favourite of mine, Ishiguro’s tale of a life devoted to service was a joy to revisit. It’s a big old wistful sigh of a novel, looking back at a life with a sense of what might have been, as previously solidly-held assumptions about duty and right/wrong come crashing down.  I understand that a book that’s ostensibly about the none-more-British subject of butlering can feel too buttoned-up and emotionless for many, but for me that’s an integral part of its enduring charm.  It couldn’t be more different from the other two novels in my top three, but it’s an undeniable masterpiece of its own kind.

1. Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders (2017) - 10
(GoodReads ranking: 32, equivalent score 7.5)

Is short story specialist Saunders’ novel as culturally significant as Midnight’s Children? Or as impeccably insightful as The Remains of the Day?  It is neither. What it is, though, is like nothing else in the history of Booker winners. It tells the story of the night of the death of Abraham Lincoln’s son, spinning a wildly fantastical narrative around a single grain of historical truth.  And what a story it is.  Within its relatively few pages we get Ghibli-inspired fantasy, playful mocking of the notion of “truth” itself, the deeply felt emotion of a bereaved father (who happens to be one of the most famous men in history), riotous humour, and mend-bending explorations of life and death. It was the only novel in the entire process that completely floored me. I didn’t want to leave its perfectly-constructed and entirely magical world. Please give this one a go if you haven’t already.


Phew.

Now, let’s get into the Women’s Prize For Fiction, shall we…?

Intro | 50-41 | 40-31 | 30-21 | 20-11 | 10-1