The Booker Prize: Every Winner Since 1969, and the Ones Worth Reading

Read it ifyou want the winner while people are still arguing about it. It is the newest book on this page, and the only one where the verdict is not settled yet.

Why it mattersThe novel that introduced magical realism to a generation of British and Commonwealth readers who hadn't encountered it before. Rushdie borrows from Sterne, Dickens, and García Márquez and produces something entirely his own. It is long, digressive, and occasionally overwhelming — and it is one of the great novels of the twentieth century. The fact that it was voted the best Booker winner of the prize's first twenty-five years, and then again of its first forty, tells you something.

Why it mattersOne of the most formally perfect novels I have ever read. Ishiguro's technique — the unreliable narrator who cannot quite tell you what he means because he cannot quite admit it to himself — is deployed here with absolute control. The repression is the point: what Stevens cannot say is the entire content of the book. It won Ishiguro the Booker and, eventually, the Nobel Prize. Read it slowly.

Why it mattersRoy spent four years writing this novel and it shows — not in the sense of overworking, but in the sense of total control. Every sentence is doing something. The tragedy at its centre is not a surprise and that is entirely the point: the book is about how the things that destroy us are usually visible long before they arrive. One of the most beautiful and heartbreaking novels I have read. A perfect Booker winner.

Why it mattersA novel that works on multiple levels simultaneously, which is rare. On the surface it is a gripping adventure; underneath it is an argument about the relationship between fiction and faith. The question it finally asks — which story do you prefer? — is one of the most honest questions a novel has ever posed to its reader. I have given this book to more people than any other on this list.

Why it mattersThe novel that made historical fiction serious again. Mantel does not simplify or romanticise the Tudor court — she makes it feel genuinely dangerous, genuinely political, genuinely human. The sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, won Mantel her second Booker in 2012 — the first time a sequel had won. Read them both. Then read The Mirror and the Light. Clear several weeks.

Why it mattersThe novel I recommend to people who say they don't have time to read. You can finish it in two sittings, and you will want to start it again immediately. Barnes is interested in a very specific kind of self-deception: not the dramatic lie we tell others, but the quiet, habitual untruth we maintain about ourselves. The last two pages are as good as anything Barnes has written, and he has written a great deal.

Why it mattersThe most formally original Booker winner of the decade, and the most emotionally unexpected. What begins as a formal experiment becomes, by the final third, genuinely moving. Saunders takes the grief of a father for a child and renders it in a form no one had ever attempted before. A novel that rewards trust: give it fifty pages before you decide.

Why it mattersThe most emotionally devastating novel to win the prize in a decade. Stuart does something very difficult: he makes you love Agnes even as she fails Shuggie, again and again, in every way a mother can fail a child. The specificity of the Glasgow setting — the tower blocks, the unemployment, the particular texture of working-class Scottish life under Thatcher — makes it feel like documentary, and the love story at its centre makes it feel universal. A book that will stay with you for years.