You’ll find the migrant experience in James’s sprawling novel, along with other daunting quests. His book is full of people “hell-bent on escaping the life that fate had all but drawn up in lines with just numbers left to color,” as one of them puts it. And James leads the way in a group of novels that showcase a virtuosic interest in distinctive voices. “What’s remarkable here is the polyvalency of English prose in 2015,” the Observer’s associate editor, the writer Robert McCrum, noted when the six finalists were announced. You can marvel at that profusion of dialects in James’s novel all by itself, as Katharine Schwab did in her entry back at the start of our discussions of the lucky finalists. The Man Booker is a prize for novels written in English, and you’ll discover all kinds of permutations of it among his mesmerizing, and enormous, cast of characters.

But let’s not forget the voices of the runners-up either. As we did in our Man Booker read-along two years ago, we’ll finish by leaving you with the first lines of each of the shortlisted nominees. James’s opening is indeed enough to lure anyone in:

Listen. Dead people never stop talking.

And here are the other five. Find one that speaks to you, and read on.

Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways:

Randeep Sanghera stood in front of the green-and-blue map tacked to the wall.

Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen:

We were fishermen: My brothers and I became fishermen in January of 1996 after our father moved out of Akure, a town in the west of Nigeria, where we had lived together all our lives.

Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life:

The eleventh apartment had only one closet, but it did have a sliding glass door that opened onto a small balcony, from which he could see a man sitting across the way, outdoors in only a T-shirt and shorts even though it was October, smoking.

Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island:

Turin is where the famous shroud is from, the one showing Christ's body supine after crucifixion: hands folded over genitals, eyes closed, head crowned with thorns.

Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread

Late one July evening in 1994, Red and Abby Whitshank had a phone call from their son Denny.