Booker Prize 2000: The Reviews

The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood

"There is something frustrating and fleeting about a novel in which we never really find out the answers, nor ever really believe in the behaviour of most of the characters."

Evening Standard

"...A sophisticated mediation on the uses and perils of fiction. If Atwood hasn't quite managed to pull off this vanishing act, it is largely because her particular brand of fictional magic-making relies on stealth and invisibility; and in this novel we get a little to close to seeing how the trick is performed."

The Guardian

When We Were Orphans - Kazuo Ishiguro

"Ishiguro shows immense tenderness for his characters. [The novel] confirms Ishiguro as one of Britain's mist formally daring and challenging novelists."

The Guardian

"You seldom read a novel that so convinces you it is extending the possibilities of fiction. Ishiguro's abandonment of realism is not a defection from reality, but the contrary."

Sunday Times

The Hiding Place - Trezza Azzopardi

"The Hiding Place is as miserable and as moving as any of the fashionably popular memoirs of childhood suffering, by Frank McCourt, Andrea Ashworth and others, but with the structure and suspense of a good novel."

Evening Standard

"Full of neat but unobtrusive gestures at the horrors beneath..... [it is] sharply written, full of crisp little vignettes and cameos. A genuine, if hugely warped, family chronicle."

The Guardian

The Keepers of Truth - Michael Collins

"Collins creates a gripping picture of slow-moving, small-town life, and packs it into a treat of a murder mystery."

The Guardian

"The author conjures up an eerie shadowland where heads rot in bunkers, "orange tumours of pumpkins" grow in fields, and the truth is as illusory as hope."

Sunday Times

The Deposition of Father McCreevy - Brian O'Doherty

"This is a wonderful novel. Some reviewers have called it haunting, and for once the epithet is deserved."

Evening Standard

English Passengers - Matthew Kneale

"At first glance it looks like any other hefty work of historical fiction, but inside it lies a slimmer, more subversive, story."

Evening Standard

"Although it contains much that is harrowing, English Passengers is also often hilarious. Tart wit generates caustically funny scenes."

Sunday Times