All lists are completely subjective, and I am not claiming to have read every Booker winner. So this list is a little like a celebrity’s ‘Desert Island Discs’, it has changed in recent years and will no doubt change again. There are more recent Booker winners which I love, Hilary Mantel for example, but have yet to re-read and so strictly they do not belong here. In no particular order, my current Top 5 are:-

AS Byatt Possession  The plaiting together of storylines and points of view in two centuries, it showed me how to plot

Yann Martel Life of Pi  The sheer magical ambition of it, a tiger in a boat

Salman Rushdie Midnight’s Children  The scope, the exotic setting, what a way of recounting the birth of a new country

Penelope Lively Moon Tiger  Perhaps my all-time favourite, for its gentle romance, its clever manipulation of point of view, the handling of death and grief. And she gets the dialogue spot-on too

Peter Carey Oscar and Lucinda  The first Peter Carey I read, the first of many, and picked up on impulse because it had won the Booker. It introduced me to Australian writers

Which 5 Booker winners do you re-read?