British writers have clinched three spots on the Man Booker prize shortlist after the UK's most prestigious literary award opened its doors to writers of any nationality for the first time in its 46-year history.

The move, intended to embrace "the freedom of English in all its vigour, its vitality, its versatility and its glory wherever it may be", had prompted fears that the heavyweights of American literature would dominate the British award. But in the event, two US writers have made the final round of this year's award: Joshua Ferris and Karen Joy Fowler.

Ferris and Fowler make the final six alongside the Australian writer Richard Flanagan, with three British writers shortlisted for the £50,000 award this year: former winner Howard Jacobson, Neel Mukherjee, and Ali Smith. Fellow UK author David Mitchell's much-anticipated new novel The Bone Clocks, described in the Guardian review by Ursula K Le Guin as "600 pages of metafictional shenanigans in relentlessly brilliant prose", missed out on a shortlist place, as did US literary stars Siri Hustvedt and Richard Powers.

Instead, picking from a longlist of 13, judges headed by philosopher AC Grayling plumped for Ferris's third novel To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, a book dubbed "The Catch-22 of dentistry" by Stephen King in which a dentist finds he is being impersonated online, and Fowler's eye-poppingly original We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, a story of one of the more unusual familes in modern fiction which has already won her the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

Flanagan was picked for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, focusing on Australian PoWs used as forced labour on the Burma Death Railway, Jacobson for the dystopian J, set in a world where it is dangerous to talk of the past, and of "What Happened, If It Happened", and Calcutta-born Mukherjee for his story of a Bengali family as it falls apart, The Lives of Others.

Smith, who has made the final Booker six twice before, completes the shortlist this time with the acclaimed How to Be Both, a combination of the stories of a teenager whose mother has just died and an Italian Renaissance painter. This is the first year the Man Booker has been open to writers of any nationality, writing originally in English and published in the UK. Previously, it could only be won by authors from the UK and Commonwealth, Republic of Ireland and Zimbabwe.

The judging panel praised the "depth and range" of the list. "As the Man Booker prize expands its borders, these six exceptional books take the reader on journeys around the world, between the UK, New York, Thailand, Italy, Calcutta and times past, present and future," said Grayling, announcing the shortlist this morning. "We had a lengthy and intensive debate to whittle the list down to these six. It is a strong, thought-provoking shortlist which we believe demonstrates the wonderful depth and range of contemporary fiction in English."

At Waterstones, Dan Lewis wrote that "after all the controversy over rule changes the American contingent, in the form of Karen Joy Fowler and Joshua Ferris, is rather unassuming – in number at least. Ferris, who at 39 is the youngest author on this year's list, perhaps hopes To Rise Again at a Decent Hour can emulate fellow listee Jacobson's 2010 win: the last time a comic novel triumphed. Meanwhile Karen Joy Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves which has proved a hit with our booksellers and customers, will no doubt be hailed as a breath of fresh air – a highly readable answer to any accusations of stuffiness or impenetrability which are so often levelled against literary prizes."

The shortlist:

To Rise Again At a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

J by Howard Jacobson

The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee

How to Be Both by Ali Smith

What we said:

Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

To Rise Again At a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris

"To Rise Again at a Decent Hour at times struggles to bear the weight of its conceit (digressions into the history of the Amalekites confound after a while), but at its best it is enormously impressive: profoundly and humanely engaged with the mysteries of belief and disbelief, linguistically agile and wrongfooting, and dismayingly funny in the way that only really serious books can be."

Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan



"One would notice, if not swept along by the tale, that the allocation of time to characters, the certainty of the narration, the confidence to pause and then lunge on,

to play with time, are all bravura accomplishments. We don't notice, though. Flanagan is too good to let us."

Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

"Many a novel has devoted itself to exploring variations of Larkin's lament about what mums and dads do to their kids. But if any other book has done it as exhilaratingly as the achingly funny, deeply serious heart-breaker that is Fowler's 10th novel, and made it ring true for the whole of mankind, I've yet to read it."

Howard Jacobson, J

J by Howard Jacobson

"To say J is unlike any other novel Jacobson has written would be misleading: the same ferocious wit runs throughout, while the minutiae of male-female relations are as sharply portrayed as ever. Nevertheless, the comparisons that will inevitably be made with earlier dystopian visions – George Orwell, of course, and the Aldous Huxley of Brave New World, but also Yevgeny Zamyatin's We – will not be difficult to justify."

Neel Mukherjee, The Lives of Others

The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee



"The cast is huge and the reader spends time, at one point or another, with most of them. It takes a while

to get to know all the men, women and children,

but the story is always gripping, and there are various

time-bombs that suddenly change the way we see

the book's whole world."

Ali Smith, How to be both

How to Be Both by Ali Smith

"There is no doubt that Smith is dazzling in her daring. The sheer inventive power of her new novel pulls you through, gasping, to the final page."

• The winner will be announced on 14 October.