Tom McCarthy and Sunjeev Sahota are the sole British novelists on the shortlist for this year’s Man Booker prize. The award-winning Andrew O’Hagan, the third British writer to be longlisted for his novel The Illuminations, failed to make the final six.

In the biggest surprise of the shortlist, the major American author Marilynne Robinson, who has won the Pulitzer, the Orange prize and a National Humanities Medal presented by Barack Obama, was eliminated from the competition, as was former Booker winner Anne Enright.

Unveiling their shortlist this morning, judges chaired by Princeton English professor Michael Wood, overlooked Lila, which has already won Robinson the National Book Critics Circle Award in the US, choosing to shortlist instead two other American writers: Pulitzer winner Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread, which unravels the story of four generations of the Whitshank family, and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life. The latter is the widely acclaimed story of four university friends living in New York, where one of them is haunted by the horrific abuse of his childhood.

Wood’s panel of judges also selected Jamaican author Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings, about gang violence in Jamaica and the attempted assassination of Bob Marley, and Nigerian writer Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen, in which four brothers in 1990s Nigeria skip school for a series of fishing trips, meeting a madman who tells them that the eldest will be killed by one of his brothers.

McCarthy, who was shortlisted for the Booker in 2010 for C, was picked for Satin Island, narrated by a “corporate anthropologist” known as U, while Sahota, one of Granta’s Best of British Novelists in 2013, was selected for The Year of the Runaways, about migrant workers from India living in Sheffield.

The judges said Satin Island “offers an elegant, desperate and funny account of what might be the world of tomorrow”, while James’s novel was “a vast fictional history” and “just exhilarating in its range of voices and registers”.



They praised A Little Life as “a work of lasting emotional impact, often larger than life itself”, and Tyler for her “supreme powers of observation and stylistic brilliance”.

The Fishermen was hailed as “a captivating tale of the tragic unravelling of a family in modern-day Nigeria” by the judges, who added, of Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways: “There are many reasons to run away, and they recur in Sunjeev Sahota’s amazing novel which borrows its title from them.”

Literary agent Bill Clegg’s Did You Ever Have a Family, Laila Lalami’s The Moor’s Account, Anuradha Roy’s Sleeping on Jupiter and Anna Smaill’s The Chimes also missed out on a place on the shortlist.

Wood said: “Only on rare occasions does celebration come so closely aligned with regret. The regret of what we left out was tempered by the enormous excitement we have in presenting the six books on the shortlist. We re-read all 13 books on the longlist and in the process we rediscovered new pleasures in each. The writers on the shortlist present an extraordinary range of approaches to fiction. They come from very different cultures and are themselves at very different stages of their careers.”



Wood is joined on the judging panel by Ellah Wakatama Allfrey, John Burnside, Sam Leith and Frances Osborne. The winner of this year’s Man Booker prize will be announced on 13 October, joining a roster of major names including Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Margaret Atwood.



The shortlist

Satin Island by Tom McCarthy (UK) Jonathan Cape.

A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James (Jamaica) Oneworld.

A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler (US) Chatto & Windus.

The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota (UK) Picador.

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (US) Picador.

The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma (Nigeria) One/Pushkin Press.



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