year’s Booker Prize?And who has been left out?
DISGRACE by JM Coetzee (Secker &Warburg)
An embittered, disgraced Cape Town professor goes to live with his daughter on an Eastern Cape farm, where they are savagely attacked. The prose never spills a drop, and is almost bloodless in its pale perfection. – James Wood
FASTING, FEASTING by Anita Desai (Chatto & Windus)
A study of family, especially the relationships between siblings. The first part wittily and movingly reveals the predicament of Uma and other Indian women; the second part lacks the energy of the first. -Bharat Magarian
HEADLONG by Michael Frayn (Faber&Faber)
Martin Clay and his wife Kate are shown a set of old paintings. Could one be a Breugel? Frayn’s humour shines through as we watch Martin try to set up an increasingly hopeless sting. – Richard Skinner
OUR FATHERS by Andrew O’Hagan (Faber &Faber)
A dark, highly wrought story that tells of the damage fathers do to sons and sons do to fathers when paying them back. The three damaged men are all hard-drinking Catholic Glaswegians. -Jonathan Glancey
THE MAP OF LOVE by Ahdaf Soueif (Bloomsbury)
Soueif’s fourth novel explores the links between Britain and Egypt, tracing two cross-cultural romances a century apart. The novel sheds a fascinating light on how the past wraps itself around the present. -Diran Adebayo
THE BLACKWATER LIGHTSHIP by Colm Tibn (Picador)
Helen’s brother Declan is dying of Aids and, with two of his gay friends, she waits for the end in her grandmother’s house. A coolly handled emotional imbroglio set against the decaying social order of old Ireland. -Des O’Fingle