No prize can please everyone, but the shortlist of six is the result of passionate and painstaking argument, says judge Sam Leith. Who would you like to win tonight?

In some ways, we’d have been happy to leave it at the longlist. As one of my fellow judges commented in the Man Booker shortlist meeting, this was the point at which the gameshow aspects of a book prize start to take over: we took a list of 13 first-rate novels and halved it for no other reason than that’s the way the game works. Tonight, we single out but one.

There are advantages and disadvantages to that process. The fewer books you are talking about, the less you’re giving a snapshot of the literary culture and the more it becomes about these books in their particularity. Most years, the reception of the longlist centres on either famous writers who’ve been omitted (“snubbed”) or on a trip through the statistical wringer (too many foreigners, if you’re one sort of newspaper; not enough women or minority writers if you’re another). Both are necessarily stupid reactions: stupid for obvious reasons; necessarily so because reaction has to be instant, and few, if any, of the commentators will have read the whole longlist, let alone the 156 novels from which it was selected.

It’s sometimes said that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. Each of us have lost books we’d like to have seen go further in the process. The shortlist from which the winner will be selected is not the one that any single one of us, unaided, would have created. But I think it’s the better for it: it was arrived at not by brute-force voting, but by careful and detailed and impassioned argument – followed, in the odd case, by brute-force voting.

So it’s a list that represents no single person’s taste, but that all of us are proud to own. We have Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings – a rumbustious, thrilling, many-voiced historical novel about gang violence in Jamaica. We have Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island – a horrifyingly comic novel of ideas with its fingers jammed into the light-socket of the age. We have Chigozie Obioma’s extraordinary debut The Fishermen – a story of brotherhood and family that mixes tragedy and farce, the mythic and the mundane. We have Sunjeev Sahota’s hugely immersive and moving story about the experience of Asian immigrants in today’s Britain, The Year of the Runaways: what those who make the journey bring with them, what they leave behind. We have, in Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread, a multi-generational family saga told with astonishing sensitivity and command. And we have A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara’s wrenching and relentless fable of sexual trauma and its aftermath.

What do you look for in a novel? Stylistic grace, emotional punch, truth to experience, extravagance of imagination, storytelling brio, moral rigour, intellectual or formal audacity, depth of characterisation, or what Milan Kundera calls “the soft gleam of the comical”…? All these virtues are amply represented on this list: every book on it is long in more than one of these suits and most of them are long in many. We think that every one of these novels has something remarkable to offer its readers. We hope you’ll agree.

• To buy any of the shortlisted books, or the full Man Booker Prize 2015 shortlist for £60 (RRP £80.94), go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.