Books of the Decade (1980s)
This is one of the 759 lists we use to generate our main The Greatest Books list.
About this list
The Independent, 76 Books
Published on Saturday 23rd December 1989 under the banner “Books of the Decade”, the feature invited this eclectic panel of novelists, historians, biographers, editors and journalists to nominate their standout titles of the 1980s. Their votes produced an aggregated ranking headed by Rites of Passage by William Golding (the only book mentioned four times), followed by a cluster of runners‑up—Bonfire of the Vanities, Love in the Time of Cholera, The Satanic Verses, Money and several others—each cited twice. A long tail of single mentions reflects the diversity of tastes across fiction, history, poetry, literary criticism and science writing. The overall spread highlights how British literary culture at the close of the decade balanced home‑grown talent with major international voices, and how the 1980s produced enduring work across genres, from Golding’s maritime morality tale to Rushdie’s controversial magic‑realist epic.
Who were the voters?
The panel comprised 22 well‑known writers, critics, broadcasters and public intellectuals—largely British, with a few Irish and American voices—who were invited by the newspaper to look back at the 1980s and choose the books that had mattered most to them. The voters were:
Melvyn Bragg, A. S. Byatt, Jan Morris, Ronald Hayman, Barbara Everett, Allan Gurganus, John Banville, Michael Foot, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Eric Christiaansen, Gabriel Josipovici, D. J. Taylor, Hugo Barnacle, Robert Winder, Jeremy Paxman, David Owen, Claire Tomalin, Godfrey Hodgson, Peter Levi, Tom Maschler, Mark Lawson and Blake Morrison.
This list was originally published in 1989 and was added to this site over 1 year ago.