# 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?

*By YPB Team · Published June 8, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/the-20-best-booker-prize-winning-novels-of-all-time*

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## Current results (3 votes)

1. **The Remains of the Day** — 66.67% (2 votes · score 1000/1000)
   Kazuo Ishiguro's 1989 winner about an English butler reflecting on a lifetime of dignified service and missed love.
2. **Midnight's Children** — 33.33% (1 votes · score 750/1000)
   Salman Rushdie's 1981 winner, later crowned the 'Booker of Bookers' as the best winner in the prize's history.
3. **The God of Small Things** — 0% (0 votes · score 625/1000)
   Arundhati Roy's 1997 debut winner about twins and forbidden love in Kerala, India.
4. **Possession** — 0% (0 votes · score 562/1000)
   A.S. Byatt's 1990 winner intertwining two scholars uncovering a secret romance between Victorian poets.
5. **The Sea** — 0% (0 votes · score 562/1000)
   John Banville's 2005 winner about a widower returning to the coastal town of his childhood.
6. **Prophet Song** — 0% (0 votes · score 482/1000)
   Paul Lynch's 2023 winner imagining a mother's struggle as Ireland slides into totalitarianism.
7. **Life of Pi** — 0% (0 votes · score 375/1000)
   Yann Martel's 2002 winner about a boy stranded on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger.
8. **The Blind Assassin** — 0% (0 votes · score 375/1000)
   Margaret Atwood's 2000 winner nesting a sci-fi tale inside a family saga of secrets and tragedy.
9. **Wolf Hall** — 0% (0 votes · score 225/1000)
   Hilary Mantel's 2009 winner reimagining the rise of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII.
10. **The Sense of an Ending** — 0% (0 votes · score 225/1000)
   Julian Barnes's 2011 winner about memory, regret, and a man forced to reckon with his past.
11. **Girl, Woman, Other** — 0% (0 votes · score 225/1000)
   Bernardine Evaristo's 2019 winner following twelve interconnected Black British lives across a century.
12. **The Line of Beauty** — 0% (0 votes · score 225/1000)
   Alan Hollinghurst's 2004 winner charting a young gay man's life amid Thatcher-era high society.
13. **Schindler's Ark** — 0% (0 votes · score 225/1000)
   Thomas Keneally's 1982 winner about the industrialist who saved over a thousand Jews during the Holocaust.
14. **Lincoln in the Bardo** — 0% (0 votes · score 225/1000)
   George Saunders's 2017 winner set over a single night among the dead surrounding Abraham Lincoln's grieving son.
15. **The White Tiger** — 0% (0 votes · score 1/1000)
   Aravind Adiga's 2008 winner narrated by a driver who claws his way out of India's underclass.
16. **The Luminaries** — 0% (0 votes · score 1/1000)
   Eleanor Catton's 2013 winner, an astrologically structured mystery set in New Zealand's gold-rush era.
17. **The English Patient** — 0% (0 votes · score 1/1000)
   Michael Ondaatje's 1992 winner about a badly burned man and the people sheltering in a wartime Italian villa.
18. **Disgrace** — 0% (0 votes · score 1/1000)
   J.M. Coetzee's 1999 winner about a disgraced professor confronting violence in post-apartheid South Africa.
19. **Shuggie Bain** — 0% (0 votes · score 1/1000)
   Douglas Stuart's 2020 debut winner about a boy growing up with his addicted mother in 1980s Glasgow.
20. **A Brief History of Seven Killings** — 0% (0 votes · score 1/1000)
   Marlon James's 2015 winner orbiting the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in 1970s Jamaica.

Tags: books, classics, all-time, booker prize, fiction