Booker Prize 2021: This year’s winning novel and previous top titles

Examining a dysfunctional white South African family living on a farm, The Promise is set during four funerals across four decades and exposes the anguish at the centre of the characters’ lives. Galgut reinvents the role of the narrator here, shifting from traditional narration to directly addressing the reader – cleverly sliding between characters and in and out of personae. It’s said to be a convincing and heartfelt novel.

Jasanoff noted that the book “manages to pull together the quality of great storytelling and great ideas, with a remarkable attention to structure and literary style”. She added that “with every reading it reveals something new”, making it the ideal addition to any bookshelf.

Set in the Eighties, this is the unforgettable story of young Hugh “Shuggie” Bain, who spends his pivotal years in run-down public housing in Glasgow. Exploring Thatcher’s politics, it’s a heartbreaking story of addiction and love. Portrayals of working-class families are so rarely seen in fiction, making Stuart’s all the more noteworthy.

It’s a story that is hard to forget – it’s intimate, challenging and compassionate. Margaret Busby, chair of the Booker judges in 2020, said it was “destined to be a classic”. It not only won the 2020 Booker Prize but was also crowned Overall and Debut Book of the Year at the British Book Awards.

Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2020, Girl, Woman, Other follows the lives and loves of 12 black, British, cisgender and genderqueer women, illuminating modern British life. It's about personal struggle but also about love, sex, friendship, joy and mistakes. Evaristo’s powerful prose weaves through different times and places with compelling originality. This unique voice allows the reader to truly feel connected to the characters.

It took the crown in our guide to the best book club books, with our writer noting that it is a “sunny, electrifying, and artfully assembled book”, calling it “a thing of absolute wonder, at once recognisable and inspiring – and fantastic”. A must-read, then.

This eagerly anticipated sequel was published 35 years after Atwood’s seminal The Hand Maid’s Tale and answers questions that were left unanswered – notably, what happened to Offred? Critiquing gender politics, oppression and authoritarianism, this is a dystopian masterpiece you need to devour. 

It, of course, featured in our review of the best Margaret Atwood books, with our writer noting that it “has cemented Atwood as a master of the speculative and dystopian novel”.

Set in Northern Ireland during The Troubles, Milkman is told by an 18-year-old unnamed narrator. While she reads 19th-century literature obsessively, she does not care much for the political turmoil that surrounds her and attempts to avoid the unwanted attention from a man many years her senior. Through short and arresting prose, it’s a tale of gossip and hearsay, silence and deliberate deafness. Expect to feel instantly immersed.  

With the backdrop of the American Civil War, Lincoln in the Bardo unfolds over the course of a single night and is the story of president Abraham Lincoln’s grief after his 11-year-old son, Willie, dies. Set in a cemetery that’s populated by a teeming horde of spirits, Saunders crafts an emotionally powerful, heartbreaking and wildly imaginative story.

It featured in our review of the best novels of 2017, with our writer praising how the author “effortlessly stitches together several divergent themes and stories without jeopardising any narrative robustness”.

The first American author to win the prize, this novel is packed with surprising and galvanising satire on race relations in the US. When we first meet Beatty’s narrator, an unnamed Black man, he’s in front of the Supreme Court on charges for keeping a slave named Hominy and reintroducing segregation. What ensues is his account of the events that preceded this moment. It’s a powerful novel that will stay with you long after you’ve put it down. 

In our guide to the best fiction books in 2016, our writer described Beatty’s America as “self-consciously absurd, profane, violent, cruel – and funny”.