Which is the best novel in the past 25 years?

On the eve of this year’s Booker Prize, 150 literary luminaries voted for the best British, Irish or Commonwealth novel from 1980 to 2005. An anguished minority argued for the inclusion of the German writer WG Sebald, whose translations of his own work render a prose so classical as to be quasi-native. Several correspondents puzzled over the meaning of ‘fiction’ and, inevitably, of ‘best’.

There was, too, a cut-off problem. 1980 is an arbitrary date. It excludes, by the narrowest of margins, VS Naipaul’s A Bend in the River (1979), by any standards one of the great novels of our time. And then, what do you do about John le Carre? Smiley himself was flourishing, imaginatively, until the Wall came down and the three main Smiley novels, written in the 1970s, were republished, in a single volume, in 1994. In the end, le Carre was represented by A Perfect Spy (1986).

In the novel, there are Anglo-Saxon and American attitudes. We celebrate a literary tradition of astonishing variety.

The winner
JM Coetzee’s Disgrace received nominations from writers across the English-speaking world. This unforgettable novel of the South African crisis has already brought its author a record breaking second Booker Prize in 1999. It is part of an oeuvre (including Waiting for the Barbarians, The Age of Iron and The Life and Times of Michael K) that was honoured by the Nobel in 2003.

First place for JM Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999)
Coetzee became the first writer to win the Booker Prize for a second time with this exploration of postapartheid South Africa, which centres on Professor David Lurie, in self-imposed exile at his daughter’s remote farm after an ill-advised affair with a student. He was the first author to be awarded the Booker Prize twice: first for Life & Times of Michael K in 1983, and again for Disgrace in 1999. On 2 October 2003 it was announced that he was to be the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the fourth African born writer to be so honoured, and the second South African.

Second place for Martin Amis’s Money (1984)
Money is a first-person narrative by John Self, advertising man and would-be film director, who is "addicted to the twentieth century." Super-charged, anarchic and full of narrative acrobatics, Money burst on to the Eighties literary scene leaving a trail of imitators and devotees in its wake, not least because of its formidable, if frequently repulsive narrator, ad director John Self .

Joint third place for Earthly Powers (1980)
Anthony BurgessHomosexual writer Keith Toomey is asked to write the memoirs of the late Pope Gregory XVII - a commission that takes him on a whirlwind recap of the major events of the 20th century.

Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001)
Opening in 1935, Atonement focuses on Briony Tallis, at first as a 13year-old implicated in the conviction of a family friend for rape and, latterly, an elderly novelist on the brink of losing her memory.

Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower (1995)
Fitzgerald’s final novel, The Blue Flower is frequently cited as her masterpiece. It recreates the life of the 18th-century German poet and philosopher Novalis, focusing on his romance with a 12-year-old girl.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled (1995)
The Unconsoled (1995) is a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. It is about Ryder, a famous pianist who arrives in a central European city to perform a concert. However, he appears to have lost most of his memory and finds his new environment surreal and dreamlike.

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981)
Rushdie’s second novel not only won the Booker prize but was also awarded the ‘Booker of Bookers’ in 1993. It unites powerful subject matter - the partition of India - with a dazzling, playful style. The novel is also an expression of the author's own childhood, his affection for the city of Bombay in those times, and the tumultuous variety of the Indian subcontinent.

Joint eighth place for Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989)
Stevens, a butler at Darlington Hall, takes a trip to the West Country. His memories particularly of the late Lord Darlington , revealed as a Nazi sym pathiser - throw into sharp relief the novel’s themes of collusion, betrayal and repression.

Amongst Women (1990) John McGahern
A powerful meditation on 20th-century Irish history, particularly focusing on the Troubles, this novel was a runner-up for the Booker prize of 1990, and a national bestseller, confirming its author’s reputation as Ireland’s leading novelist.

John McGahern’s That They May Face the Rising Sun (2001)
A study of a rural community in Ireland, the changing seasons and the gradual creep of modernity. A genrebending fiction that incorporates memoir, history, folklore and a therapeutic reprise of the author’s own career.

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