After the Seventies saw the Booker taking its tentative first steps, stumbling here and there, occasionally landing on a genuine classic but more often than not serving up curiosities rather than solid-gold genius, we venture into more solid ground in the Eighties.

There’s a sense here of more self-awareness, of the need for winners to feel “important” and make a statement of some kind. There are certainly more hits than misses, and even the latter are perhaps in some ways more interesting than those of the previous decade.

The Remains of the Day focuses on Stevens, an experienced butler at the top of his trade, but coming towards his twilight years, and in the employ of a newly-arrived American businessman following years of dedicated service to the aristocratic Lord Darlington. The first-person narrative is located in the 1950s, with Stevens in charge of much-reduced staff from his glory days, and beginning to notice small errors in his previously perfectionist work. He accepts his employer’s offer of a break, for the purposes of which he borrows his car and heads off on a tour of the South West of England, part of which will involve a visit to an old colleague, Miss Kenton.

Oscar and Lucinda describes the lives of two very different characters whose lives become intertwined when they meet on a long sea journey to Australia in the mid nineteenth century and discover a shared passion for the (then illicit) world of gambling. Oscar Hopkins is a devout Christian, from an evangelical background with a memorably fanatical father, who converts to Anglicanism, which while relatively moderate, still is very much unable to tolerate his increasing addiction to the card table and racecourse. Lucinda Laplastrier is an Australian orphan and heiress who ploughs her fortune into a glass factory. When their paths cross, a mutual love develops between the unlikely pair, but despite them ending up cohabiting, it remains tragically unspoken.

On her deathbed, popular historian and journalist Claudia Hampton decides to write “a history of the world,” which turns out to be a kaleidoscopic reflection on her own life, going back and forth in time anchored around the loss of the great love of her life, a soldier called Tom who she meets in 1942 Egypt. The titular “moon tiger” is a mosquito repellant device, “a green coil that slowly burns all night… dropping away into lengths of grey ash” - present at a pivotal (and ultimately, final) moment in her relationship with Tom, and its “glowing red eye” is a light that she’s unable to look away from, returning to it time and again throughout the novel.

The Old Devils is about the lives and relationships of a bunch of old men (and their wives, to a lesser extent) in Wales. Central among these are Peter - mainly notable for being larger than before; Malcolm - likes jazz and talking about his bowels; and Charlie - I honestly can’t remember but not especially pleasant either. Their routine of going to the pub, getting slowly larger, and seemingly not a whole lot else, is interrupted by the arrival of their former friend Alun, back from “that London” a minor TV celebrity and writer, largely peddling a quaint and simplistic touristified version of “Wales” that his erstwhile buddies don’t recognise, and in thrall to a thinly veiled Dylan Thomas proxy.

Kerewin Holmes, sometime painter and amateur musician, is getting on with her somewhat solitary life in her self-built Tower home on the coast of New Zealand’s South Island, when she is visited by a troubled yet precocious mute child going by the name of Simon. Simon, the victim of the shipwreck of a European vessel in which his parents were presumed killed, is in the care of Joe, a local man of mostly Maori heritage, who strikes up an unlikely friendship with Kerewin based (largely) on his willingness to keep her company playing chess, cooking various largely fish-based meals and drinking alarming quantities of alcohol.

Edith Hope, a moderately successful romance novelist, arrives at the Hotel du Lac, on the shores of Lake Geneva, where she has been “banished” by friends for a misdemeanor which is for large parts of the novel unclear. She begins her stay refusing to change, intending to keep a distance from the small number of fellow guests and work on her latest novel. As the novel progresses, however, she begins to engage with the other guests and reflect on her life.

Michael K, a poor man with a cleft lip, quits his job as a gardener in Cape Town to honour his sick mother’s wishes to return her to the countryside of her childhood, in Prince Albert. In a fictionalized South Africa which is descending into civil war, Michael is unable to leave freely by ordinary means due to a (shall we say, kafkaesque?) bureaucracy that is purposefully paradoxical and impossible to defeat, so sets off on an impossibly long journey, carrying his mother through heavily guarded streets and freezing nights on a shoddily improvised rickshaw.

Keneally’s Holocaust novel, the basis of Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, zooms in on the story of Oskar Schindler, a Sudeten-German industrialist who takes it upon himself to “save” thousands of Jews, initially by employing them in his enamelworks factory, Emalia, in Krakow (Poland), rather than having them sent to the horrors of Amon Goeth’s nearby Plaszow internment camp or - far worse - to almost certain extermination at Auschwitz. The later part of the novel documents the (even more incredible and shocking) transit of the Schindlerjuden away from the doomed Emalia camp and to a new factory near Schindler’s Sudeten/Czech hometown.

Midnight’s Children is a novel of many parts, meanings and interpretations. It tells the story not just of the complex and fantastic life of a man, Saleem Sinai, but of a young nation for whom Saleem is a mirror / proxy. It covers a large time period (from 30 years prior to the birth of Saleem / India to the present day), movements across the whole Indian subcontinent, wars, rises and falls of families and political dynasties, and people (including real people, proxies for real people, fictional inventions and fantastical creations.) There are, as they say, many worlds contained within these pages.

Rites of Passage kicks off the 1980s by taking us back in time to the start of the nineteenth century. The aristocratic Edmund Talbot embarks upon a long voyage to Australia, and keeps a journal to amuse his godfather back home in England. In cramped quarters on a dilapidated warship, he recounts tales of the ship’s varied inhabitants from all classes of society, in a witty and extremely lively narrative that prods and interrogates the structures and conflicts of the English class system in microcosm.