Flaubert’s Parrot, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1984, concerns the attempts of an increasingly bemused researcher to establish certain facts about a famous French novelist and the stuffed bird which used to sit on his desk.A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters blends fact and fiction in a virtuoso kaleidoscope of vignettes from Noah’s time to the present. One of the author’s most inventive works, it was praised by Salman Rushdie as ‘frequently brilliant, funny, thoughtful, iconoclastic and a delight to read’.