Show caption Top of the pile … George Saunders. Photograph: Tim Knox George Saunders and Mohsin Hamid lead a daring Man Booker shortlist Alex Clark A spirit of experiment resounds through the chosen novels from writers including Paul Auster and Ali Smith Wed 13 Sep 2017 10.55 BST Share on Facebook

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Paul Auster had not written a novel for seven years, and then he wrote one that came in at nearly 900 pages. Three of the other writers shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker prize had never written one before – although to regard master fabulist George Saunders as a debutant simply because he has hitherto devoted his creative energies to the short form is something of a cheat. The other two – Emily Fridlund and Fiona Mozley – we can certainly allow, as well as noting that their novels, History of Wolves and Elmet, privilege the complicatedly unreliable stories of solitary children in solitary places, both made vulnerable by the violence of adults.

In a shortlist that seems to reject conventional realism and celebrate precarious and unstable narratives, our half-dozen to watch is completed by Ali Smith’s Autumn and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West. Smith’s novel, written against the clock as the summer of Brexit unfolded last year, manages to capture the immediacy of a divided country while weaving in an echo of the prizewinning How to Be Both by revivifying a forgotten artist. Hamid’s Exit West is a novel of migrants and refugees that slips the confines of particular reality by constantly crossing and recrossing the borders of genre and form.

It’s worth remarking that the shortlist doesn’t represent – as sometimes happens – a rupture with the longlist. The novels that have fallen by the wayside, including Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones, were also characterised by their willingness to take liberties with form, the better to unsettle their readers.

Saunders’s novel Lincoln in the Bardo takes the inhospitable narrative to an extreme; when the novel opens, the reader has no clue what’s going on, and little in the way of footholds. Fragmentary, multi-vocal, buffeted by changes of scene, mood and tone, the narrative is an exercise in supreme irony: all this made-up stuff, and yet a real historical event – the death of Abraham Lincoln’s son, Willie – is at its centre. Although it divided critics, one can see what compelled the Booker panel: set largely in an afterlife filled with sorrow, terror and love, it emerges as an enlarging and humane novel. Bookmakers certainly seem to have agreed, making the novel immediate favourite to win.

In its theme of the responsibility that comes with power, and of the personal set against the vast crisis of the American civil war, Lincoln in the Bardo also resonates with contemporary socio-political preoccupations. And anxiety is present across this list: how we live, what binds us to one another, what constitutes identity in the midst of disintegration and displacement. Even Auster’s 4321, which appears to be centred on an individual history and consciousness, yields to the idea of chance, to the arbitrariness of an apparently obvious trajectory, to chaos.

As ever, the interests of the judging panel prove illuminating: this year, one can see how novelist and short-story writer Sarah Hall and Nabokovian Lila Azam Zanganeh may have championed narrative playfulness and indeterminacy, and how travel writer Colin Thubron would have significant things to say about the evocation of place. The chair, Baroness Lola Young, used to sitting on the boards of the National Theatre and the Southbank Centre as well as in the House of Lords, would have kept them in order. But perhaps most riveting is the figure of artist Tom Phillips, whose “novel” A Humument consists of an original text, repeatedly altered by deletion, collage and drawing, over the course of many decades. The idea of a piece of art that remains deliberately unfinished, hovering between forms, always ready to mutate, seems in some sense the presiding spirit of this fascinating shortlist – and might even point us towards the future of novel: a provisional artefact in a shifting culture.