Best Booker Prize Novels: The Essential Reading List

The Booker Prize has been awarded since 1969, and its record is better than any comparable prize’s: more often than not, the Booker identifies the important English-language novel of the year, and the list of winners reads as a rough canon of serious English fiction since the 1970s.

The list below covers the winners that have genuinely earned their place — novels that the prize correctly identified as significant and that have proved their importance in the decades since. It does not attempt to cover every winner, only the essential ones.

The Essential Winners

Wolf Hall — Hilary Mantel (2009)

The most ambitious historical novel in English since A Tale of Two Cities. Mantel’s account of Thomas Cromwell — Henry VIII’s chief minister, a blacksmith’s son who rose to become the most powerful man in England — is written in an unusual third-person present tense that gives the impression of consciousness unfolding in real time. The novel won the Booker Prize; its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, also won (making Mantel the first author to win twice). Wolf Hall is the greatest achievement of British historical fiction in the last fifty years.

The Remains of the Day — Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)

Stevens, the butler of a great English country house, takes a road trip in the mid-1950s and reflects on his career serving Lord Darlington — a man whose political sympathies in the 1930s turned out to have been with the wrong side. The novel is about what Stevens sacrificed in service of his professional ideal of dignity: his political judgment, his relationship with the housekeeper Miss Kenton, possibly his entire emotional life. It is one of the most precise examinations of self-deception in English fiction.

Ishiguro later won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Remains of the Day is the novel he is most identified with and the most formally perfect thing he has written.

The God of Small Things — Arundhati Roy (1997)

Roy’s debut won the Booker in 1997 and has never been surpassed in her body of work (she has not published a second novel in the twenty years since). Set in Kerala, following the Ipe family across two time periods — the early 1960s and 1993 — the novel deals with India’s caste system, the politics of the Communist Party in Kerala, and a forbidden love whose consequences are catastrophic. Roy’s prose style — dense with wordplay, imagery, and invented compound words — is immediately recognisable and completely distinctive.

Shuggie Bain — Douglas Stuart (2020)

Douglas Stuart’s debut is the most recent winner on this list and the one most likely to endure. Set in 1980s Glasgow during the Thatcher years, it follows Shuggie Bain — a sensitive, gender-nonconforming boy — and his relationship with his mother Agnes, an alcoholic struggling to survive the destruction of working-class Scotland by deindustrialisation. The novel is devastating, beautiful, and specific: the world it describes is rendered with the precision of lived experience (Stuart grew up in the conditions he describes).

More Essential Winners

Beloved — Toni Morrison (1988)

Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel was also shortlisted for the Booker (the rules at the time limited the prize to Commonwealth writers, and Morrison was American). Included here because it is inseparable from the history of the prize in the broader sense — the novel that most serious readers of Booker-calibre fiction have read alongside the winners. The ghost of Sethe’s murdered daughter, the trauma of slavery rendered through form and through magic — this is the great American novel of its generation.

The Luminaries — Eleanor Catton (2013)

The most formally inventive recent Booker winner. Set during the New Zealand gold rush of the 1860s, constructed on a strict astrological schema (each section half the length of the previous one, each character associated with a celestial body), The Luminaries is a mystery novel and a structural demonstration piece simultaneously. Catton was twenty-eight when she won — the youngest winner in the prize’s history. At 830 pages it demands patience, which the plotting and the structural revelation reward.

The Sellout — Paul Beatty (2016)

The only American winner. A Black man in a fictional Los Angeles suburb reinstitutes slavery (of himself) and segregation as a satirical provocation. Beatty’s novel is the most formally radical and the funniest American novel of the last decade — a satirical attack on race in America that uses absurdism to say what realism cannot. It received some of the most divided reviews in Booker history; it is also unmistakably important.

Girl, Woman, Other — Bernardine Evaristo (2019)

Twelve interconnected Black British lives across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, written in an innovative prose-poetry form (no full stops; sentences running into one another). Evaristo shared the 2019 prize with Margaret Atwood — a decision that generated controversy, as the rules had previously prohibited shared prizes — and the quality of her novel justifies it: this is the fullest rendering of Black British experience in contemporary fiction.

Reading by Period

Classic winners (1970s–1990s): The Remains of the Day → The God of Small Things → Wolf Hall.

Recent winners (2010s): The Luminaries → The Sellout → Shuggie Bain → Girl, Woman, Other.

Start anywhere: The Remains of the Day is the safest first Booker novel — universally acclaimed, formally accessible, and absolutely devastating.