The 20 Best Booker Prize-Winning Novels of All Time

Decades of literary firepower sit side by side here, from sweeping historical epics to intimate debuts that floored the critics — some beloved, some fiercely divisive. Which one deserves the crown?

1. 1
   The Remains of the Day

   Kazuo Ishiguro's 1989 winner about an English butler reflecting on a lifetime of dignified service and missed love.
   1000pts
2. 2
   Midnight's Children

   Salman Rushdie's 1981 winner, later crowned the 'Booker of Bookers' as the best winner in the prize's history.
   750pts
3. 3
   The God of Small Things

   Arundhati Roy's 1997 debut winner about twins and forbidden love in Kerala, India.
   625pts
4. 4
   Possession

   A.S. Byatt's 1990 winner intertwining two scholars uncovering a secret romance between Victorian poets.
   562pts
5. 5
   The Sea

   John Banville's 2005 winner about a widower returning to the coastal town of his childhood.
   562pts
6. 6
   Prophet Song

   Paul Lynch's 2023 winner imagining a mother's struggle as Ireland slides into totalitarianism.
   482pts
7. 7
   Life of Pi

   Yann Martel's 2002 winner about a boy stranded on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger.
   375pts
8. 8
   The Blind Assassin

   Margaret Atwood's 2000 winner nesting a sci-fi tale inside a family saga of secrets and tragedy.
   375pts
9. 9
   Wolf Hall

   Hilary Mantel's 2009 winner reimagining the rise of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII.
   225pts
10. 10
    The Sense of an Ending

    Julian Barnes's 2011 winner about memory, regret, and a man forced to reckon with his past.
    225pts
11. 11
    Girl, Woman, Other

    Bernardine Evaristo's 2019 winner following twelve interconnected Black British lives across a century.
    225pts
12. 12
    The Line of Beauty

    Alan Hollinghurst's 2004 winner charting a young gay man's life amid Thatcher-era high society.
    225pts
13. 13
    Schindler's Ark

    Thomas Keneally's 1982 winner about the industrialist who saved over a thousand Jews during the Holocaust.
    225pts
14. 14
    Lincoln in the Bardo

    George Saunders's 2017 winner set over a single night among the dead surrounding Abraham Lincoln's grieving son.
    225pts
15. 15
    The White Tiger

    Aravind Adiga's 2008 winner narrated by a driver who claws his way out of India's underclass.
    1pts
16. 16
    The Luminaries

    Eleanor Catton's 2013 winner, an astrologically structured mystery set in New Zealand's gold-rush era.
    1pts
17. 17
    The English Patient

    Michael Ondaatje's 1992 winner about a badly burned man and the people sheltering in a wartime Italian villa.
    1pts
18. 18
    Disgrace

    J.M. Coetzee's 1999 winner about a disgraced professor confronting violence in post-apartheid South Africa.
    1pts
19. 19
    Shuggie Bain

    Douglas Stuart's 2020 debut winner about a boy growing up with his addicted mother in 1980s Glasgow.
    1pts
20. 20
    A Brief History of Seven Killings

    Marlon James's 2015 winner orbiting the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in 1970s Jamaica.
    1pts