No Spark, Lessing or Ballard -the Booker Prize shortlist leaves the race wide open for a dark horse. Here is our quick guide to the shortlist The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (Bloomsbury) Margaret Atwood finds herself shortlisted for the Booker for the fourth time with her 10th novel. The story has three interwoven narratives: the memoir of 82-year-old Iris Chase, whose sister Laura was the author of a novel, The Blind Assassin, and died tragically just after the end of the war; the story of Laura’s novel, a romance between a wealthy girl and a leftist on the run; and the science-fiction stories these two lovers invent. The verdict: “The demands of Atwood’s tricksy plot have produced a curiously reactionary world picture, in which men have political convictions, while women’s lives contain nothing more serious than love.” – Adam Mars-Jones The odds: 2-1
The Hiding Place by Trezza Azzopardi (Picador)
Trezza Azzopardi is a graduate of the University of East Anglia creative-writing course, and her first novel is set in her birthplace, Cardiff’s Tiger Bay. Her narrator is Dolores, the daughter of a family of Maltese immigrants whose feckless father, Frankie Gauci, is deeply enmeshed in gambling and the tightly-knit world of the Maltese mafia.One by one he sisters leave the claustrophobia of the family home, but the bonds between them and their father remain. The verdict: “She is an extraordinarily instinctive writer with a delicate feel for language.” – Maggie O’Farrell The odds: 7-1/5-1 When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber & Faber) Kazuo Ishiguro won the Booker Prize in 1989 with The Remains of the Day, and his new contender also begins in the England of the 1930s. Christopher Banks is a fashionable society detective haunted by an unsolved crime in his past. Banks travels to Shanghai and begins to search through the ruins … The verdict: “The book has many virtues: it is surely developed and extended; it is full of ingenious variation; it builds to an admirable and satisfying climax. Its virtues, in short, are all architectural ones. It starts to present a problem when we look at the voice.” – Philip Hensher The odds: 5-2/7-2
English Passengers by Matthew Kneale (Hamish Hamilton) Matthew Kneale is a previous winner of both the Somerset Maugham Prize and the John Llewellyn Prize. This, his fourth novel, is set in the 19th century and follows the journey of a Yorkshire vicar, the Reverend Geoffrey Wilson, determined to prove that the Garden of Eden was originally located in Tasmania. Travelling with him is a surgeon attempting to confirm a more sinister thesis, the supremacy of the Saxon race. Their insufferable egos and hunger for fame ensure that the two men show themselves at their worst on their long adventure.
The verdict: “Matthew Kneale’s new novel is a fine piece of historical fiction … a pleasantly witty book.” – Robert Potts The odds: 4-1/5-1 The Deposition of Father McGreevy by Brian O’Doherty (Arcadia)
This novel is narrated by an Irish magazine editor who becomes fascinated by the story of macabre goings-on in an isolated Irish village during the last war. He obtains a copy of the village priest’s testament, an account of a place where modernity had barely touched the lives of these hardy mountain men and women, until all the women of the village were struck by a mysterious plague.
The verdict: “Brian O’Doherty has created a vivid narrative voice that for the most part avoids parody. His Ireland is primal, menacing, chthonic …” – Stephanie Merritt The odds: 5-1/6-1
The Keepers of Truth by Michael Collins (Phoenix House) Michael Collins, an Irishman who lives in Seattle, has established a big reputation in the United States, where his first book, The Life and Times of a Teaboy, was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. The Keepers of Truth is set in a dying industrial town and is narrated by a young journalist . When one of the town elders goes missing, suspicion is focused on his son.
The verdict: “Collins’s new novel achieves the satisfactions of the conventional novel while unfolding a bleak, utterly contemporary picture of a society in terrible dissolution.” – Robert McCrum The odds: 9-2/3-1 Odds supplied by William Hill and Ladbrokes