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

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

Midnight's Children

Salman Rushdie's 1981 winner, later crowned the 'Booker of Bookers' as the best winner in the prize's history.

817pts

3

The God of Small Things

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

726pts

4

Possession

A.S. Byatt's 1990 winner intertwining two scholars uncovering a secret romance between Victorian poets.

681pts

5

The Sea

John Banville's 2005 winner about a widower returning to the coastal town of his childhood.

681pts

6

Prophet Song

Paul Lynch's 2023 winner imagining a mother's struggle as Ireland slides into totalitarianism.

623pts

7

Life of Pi

Yann Martel's 2002 winner about a boy stranded on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger.

545pts

8

The Blind Assassin

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

545pts

9

Wolf Hall

Hilary Mantel's 2009 winner reimagining the rise of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII.

436pts

10

Schindler's Ark

Thomas Keneally's 1982 winner about the industrialist who saved over a thousand Jews during the Holocaust.

436pts

11

The Sense of an Ending

Julian Barnes's 2011 winner about memory, regret, and a man forced to reckon with his past.

436pts

12

Lincoln in the Bardo

George Saunders's 2017 winner set over a single night among the dead surrounding Abraham Lincoln's grieving son.

436pts

13

Girl, Woman, Other

Bernardine Evaristo's 2019 winner following twelve interconnected Black British lives across a century.

436pts

14

The Line of Beauty

Alan Hollinghurst's 2004 winner charting a young gay man's life amid Thatcher-era high society.

436pts

15

The White Tiger

Aravind Adiga's 2008 winner narrated by a driver who claws his way out of India's underclass.

272pts

16

The Luminaries

Eleanor Catton's 2013 winner, an astrologically structured mystery set in New Zealand's gold-rush era.

272pts

17

The English Patient

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

0pts

18

Shuggie Bain

Douglas Stuart's 2020 debut winner about a boy growing up with his addicted mother in 1980s Glasgow.

0pts

19

A Brief History of Seven Killings

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

0pts

20

Disgrace

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

0pts