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Trying to pick the winner of the prestigious Man Booker Prize for Fiction is, as they say in punting circles, a mug's game.
All the books on offer have literary merit, all show imagination, creativity, and are a-swirl with clever language. But which author will pocket the £50,000 prize?
Will it be Paul Auster, who might be a contender for all the books he's written in the past, like the Oscars given out for longevity? Or Mohsin Hamid, who combines poetry and politics with his sliding doors of migration and refuge?
It could be Ali Smith for taking on all the seasons of a year and politics to boot? Or George Saunders for history with ghosts and voices from the 'sick boxes' of inventiveness?
And what about the audacious new writers, Emily Fridlund and Fiona Mozley?
RN's Books and Arts team give you the lowdown on the field and attempt to read the tea leaves.
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
Exit West is the second novel by Mohsin Hamid that's been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His bestselling The Reluctant Fundamentalist was shortlisted in 2007.
Exit West is a slim novel, but its narrative scope is wide and unexpected. The story begins innocuously enough, as a girl meets boy scenario.
The boy and girl are Saeed and Nadia, as their relationship unfolds we learn their unnamed city is flooded by refugees and people's lives are marred by terrorism and violent militants.
Hamid disrupts expectations from the start. Nadia is not religious but wears a full black robe — as it's called in the book — and rides a motorbike. Saeed is open-minded with a good education, but lives with his parents.
As the unrest and violence increases, the couple flee, not over land or sea, but through mysterious "black doors" that are portals to the Greek Islands, Germany, London and the USA.
The novel has a fable-like feel — it's a blend of social realism and speculative fiction with a dash of the weird, a tale of shared humanity which seeks to show that immigration is a story we all share. As Hamid tells us: "We are all migrants through time."
A tale for our times with a glimmer of hope that's told in an innovative way, Exit West is a definite contender.
Elmet by Fiona Mozley
Elmet is an ancient place in the north of England. It's also home to a man and his two children, who build a home from the dirt floor up, making their own furniture and bending wood into bows for hunting.
The family's home isn't quite legal, and the local heavy wants them out. But Daddy is a giant, a bareknuckle fighter, formidable and set on defending his little family of outsiders.
Fiona Mozley's debut is spare, clever and at times heart-stoppingly violent. Despite the subject matter, it is an entirely contemporary novel.
It aches with poetry and history, and has about it a sense of poverty, inequality and communions lost.
The story is told by the boy of the family, a gentle soul who sees both his father and fierce sister as heroes.
Mozley began writing the novel on her smartphone while commuting on the train between York and London for work. To be shortlisted as a debut novelist is quite an achievement.
The book has an outsider's chance of winning, and wouldn't that be thrilling?
History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund
Like Elmet, Emily Fridlund's History of Wolves is an outlier on the shortlist.
And like Mozley's book, this one is also a story of outsiders, isolation, and living on the edge of things.
Linda is 14 and lives next to a lake in America with a strange family — she becomes obsessed by another odd little family on the other shore.
Everything in the book is grim and grey and flat. It's clever but distant. There's sex and too much religion.
This one is hard to judge as it's hard to "get".
Did we read it too fast? Perhaps it's simply a matter of taste — which shows how hard it is to judge literary awards.
History of Wolves is not an obvious winner, but it has all the edges that suggest it's worth tussling with.
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
George Saunders is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of many comically absurd short stories, which have drawn him a legion of fans, including Lena Dunham and David Sedaris.
Lincoln in the Bardo is his first novel, but its riffs and wordplay will be familiar to those who've read Saunders before.
There is an aching depth and compassionate breadth to this novel, though.
It tells the story of Abraham Lincoln and his beloved son Willie, who died from typhoid fever at 11.
Willie finds himself conscious in a realm of ghosts ("the bardo") but irredeemably cut off from his anguished father, who visits the Georgetown Cemetery to cradle his son's lifeless body.
The tenderness of their relationship is beautifully rendered, but Lincoln's loss is magnified by his awareness of all the other parents suffering the loss of a child because of the Civil War: "Having exported this grief some 3,000 times. So far. To date. A mountain. Of boys. Someone's boys."
Written before the election of Donald Trump, Lincoln in the Bardo is a meditation on the universal experience of grief and on the grave responsibilities of adulthood — and another solid possibility for this year's prize.
Autumn by Ali Smith
There must be something seasonal in the air: both the Norwegian juggernaut, Karl Ove Knausgard, and British writer, Ali Smith, have both published books titled Autumn, each the first of a planned quartet on the seasons.
Smith writes deft, elegant, intelligent novels and Autumn is no exception. The book is preoccupied by time, and the way that is experienced in our own lives and in the life of the planet. In Autumn the most meaningful relationship is the friendship between Daniel and Elisabeth — two people separated by 69 years.
The United Kingdom that Daniel and Elisabeth inhabit is one of new borders and old prejudices made fresh: "All across the country, people felt it was the wrong thing. All across the country, people felt it was the right thing. All across the country, people felt they'd really lost. All across the country, people felt they'd really won."
Autumn follows the wonderful How to Be Both, a novel made up of two stories, one set in 15th century Italy, and one in contemporary Britain. The reader was invited to read them in whichever order they wanted.
There is less lightness and freedom in Autumn, but in its place is an insistent questioning of where Britain is now, and where it is heading.
Smith was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize back in 2014, but was eventually pipped-at-the-post by Australian writer Richard Flanagan. As a former winner of the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction and the Goldsmith's Prize, she's definitely a strong contender.
4321 by Paul Auster
4321 is Paul Auster's first book in seven years. At almost 900 pages it's his longest, but it deals with some of the themes we've come to expect from Auster's novel: the "what ifs" we all puzzle over, and how the internal wandering mind is often at odds with its external outpourings.
The main character, Archibald Isaac, is the only child of New York couple Rose and Stanley Ferguson. But as soon as baby Archie takes his first breath he experiences four separate and simultaneous lives.
While there are some qualities the four Archie's share, such as being drawn to writing and the same girl, the divergence in their world histories, memories, conditions, and the vagaries of fate mould very different life and mind experiences.
As the 15-year-old Archie 3 says: "He had accumulated enough memories to know that the world around him was continually being shaped by the world within him."
Echoing Auster's own life, Archies grow up in various suburbs of New Jersey in a post-war America. The novel dips into the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement, John F Kennedy and the rise of Muhammad Ali, and also spends time in Paris and Columbia.
It's a huge, reverberating novel. Whether it has a chance of winning this year's prize — well, that's up to fate and circumstance.
The winner of The Man Booker Prize will be announced on October 17.
Topics: books-literature, author, novel, arts-and-entertainment, fiction, english-literature, awards-and-prizes, united-kingdom, pakistan, united-states
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