Ten novels that ought to have won...the Man Booker Prize

Ten novels that ought to have won...the Man Booker Prize

by Alan Taylor and Rosemary Goring

With the latest winner of the prestigious prize due to be announced on 14 October, here's a reminder that the judges don't always make the right choice.

1 The Driver's Seat, by Muriel Spark

So short you can read it in the time it takes to suck a Pandrop, Spark's 1970 chiller features Lise who is looking for someone to kill her. "Kill me," she tells her hired assassin, repeating the instruction in four different languages. Effortlessly inventive.

2 The Children of Dynmouth, by William Trevor

Dynmouth in Dorset is the kind of place where people used to holiday before they discovered abroad. Its children are like children anywhere: "They led double lives." One is Timothy Gedge, a socially inept and curious teenager, who pokes his nose into other folks' business with scary consequences. Seriously creepy.

3 The Bookshop, by Penelope Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald, who once owned a bookshop herself, situated her fictional one in the seaside resort of Hardborough. Its owner arrives in hope and soon succumbs to despair, realising that a town without a bookshop does not necessarily want one. Very true.

4 A Bend in the River, by V.S. Naipaul

Naipaul's nightmarish 1979 novel was as prescient as it was perceptive. We are in a war-torn African state, which has a new president and where people are summarily executed or mysteriously disappear. For its inhabitants this is what stands for normality. A 20th-century Heart of Darkness.

5 Earthly Powers, by Anthony Burgess

If there is a better overture to a novel than Burgess's opening sentence, it must be a humdinger: "It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me." Who wouldn't want to read on - and on - after that?

6 An Ice-Cream War, by William Boyd

Boyd's second novel, published in 1982, takes its lead from old school colonialist novelists - P.C. Wren, Rider Haggard and John Buchan - and uses them for its own subversive ends. The scene is Africa in the First World War where fighting went on even after the Armistice in Europe because no one told the combatants to stop. An unlikely story but all too believable, and brilliantly told.

7 Money, by Martin Amis

A feminist cabal ensured Money did not even make it on to the shortlist in 1984. Sub-titled "A Suicide Note", it features porn freak, jet-setter, womaniser and money grabber, John Self. New York - where else? - is scene of his worst excesses. Remorselessly funny, utterly unPC.

8 Illywhacker, by Peter Carey

An 'illywhacker' is an Australian conman. One such is 139-year-old Herbert Badgery, who is as funny as he is lustful, and blessed with the ability to disappear. He is also a terrible liar. In a word, the perfect protagonist of a novel.

9 Nice Work, by David Lodge

Rummidge (aka Birmingham) is the location for this 1988 rib-tickler featuring Robyn Penrose, a feminist lecturer who specialises in the industrial novel and women's fiction, two genres Lodge sends up mercilessly. Then as now, the campus is preoccupied with cuts. And, of course, sex.

10 Mother's Milk, by Edward St Aubyn

Part of the Melrose (no connection with the bijou Borders town) saga, Mother's Milk is like surgery, deeply cutting, intensely worrying and personally invasive. And there's pain aplently, albeit leavened with a heavy dose of laughing gas.