Six novels selected as the century's 'best of the best' The oldest on the shortlist is Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter, which won the prize in 1948. Its main character is a police officer in west Africa. Inspired by Greene's experience as an intelligence officer in Sierra Leone, it features his traditional themes of colonial intrigue, sexual passions and Catholic guilt. Muriel Spark's The Mandelbaum Gate, which is set in Jerusalem in 1961 and which won in 1965, takes on powerful issues including the Holocaust. Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter, about a circus performer who claims to have been hatched from an egg and grown wings, won the prize in 1984. Prof Walker said the book "created a whole new way of thinking about writing about women's experiences." A Disaffection, by James Kelman, was awarded the prize in 1989, and had a groundbreaking effect on Scottish literature, founding a sub-genre that would later include the likes of Trainspotting. Cormac McCarthy's The Road, winner of the prize in 2006, is a bleak tale of a father and son's journey across a blasted post-apocalyptic landscape. Crossing The River by Caryl Phillips won the James Tait Black Prize in 1993, and features three stories about people of African slave descent at different stages in history. The shortlist omits some giants of the 20th-century literary canon, including EM Forster's A Passage to India and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. Midnight's Children jointly won the James Tait Black Prize in 1981 and was later named best of all Booker Prize- winning novels. Prof Walker said: "That is the one book that I thought at the beginning of the process we could pencil in as a sure-fire one of the six." But the novels that had made the shortlist were those that had stood the test of time, he said. The winning book will be revealed in December.