Part of the job of judging the Man Booker prize is to choose a group of books that will stand the test of time, that will bear the weight of any reader's return. What these novels on the longlist have in common, therefore, is the extent of their ambition and their reach.
It's a list for time travellers: Paul Kingsnorth's The Wake begins in the year of the Norman conquest, and is told in a bravura language unaltered by Latinate influence – the book was crowd-funded, to boot. David Mitchell, in The Bone Clocks, and Howard Jacobson in J, lead us out into the future in very different ways – a real departure for Jacobson. In The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan takes on the legacy of the second world war for both Australians and Japanese; Neel Mukherjee, in The Lives of Others, chooses Calcutta in the 1960s for his setting: and yet both these books cast a sharp beam on the present, too – as does The Wake.
Vivid characters drew us back to novels as we were choosing. In David Nicholls's Us a portrait of middle-aged marriage – and its breakdown – is delineated with humour and heart; the voices in Ali Smith's surprising, enchanting How to be both are vividly alive, whispering into our ears. Karen Joy Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is the compelling, sometimes shocking story of a family; it raises the question of what it means, finally, to be human. A cliche? Not this time. Trust me.
Some of these books reflect, in very different ways, on art and the making of art. Siri Hustvedt's The Blazing World considers a woman artist who took on male avatars in her lifetime: like Smith, Hustvedt addresses society's interpretation of gender in a sophisticated and compelling narrative. Richard Powers's Orfeo begins with a burst of suspected bioterrorism, but its depiction of music and musicianship is what really makes it stand out. Niall Williams's History of the Rain is a surge of language, beautiful and enchanting, a novel that weaves a love of literature into its own moving tale.
There are four Americans on this list: Hustvedt, Fowler and Powers are joined by Joshua Ferris; Joseph O'Neill is Irish American. Ferris's To Rise Again at a Decent Hour will convince you that you've been waiting for a novel about a Park Avenue dentist: no small feat. But, like O'Neill's The Dog, set in the alternative universe of Dubai, it's a wicked takedown of the 21st-century predicament: the virtual world, the financial world, the selves we create to face that world.
There's much more to say, but now I want you to read these books yourself.
