Ten authors are today singing the praises of daytime television, having earned their places on the most eclectic book prize list of all: the coveted - by publishers, booksellers and authors alike - Richard and Judy Award.

The list announced yesterday is an eyebrow-popping assemblage of fiction and biography, bringing together one Booker prize nominee, one runaway bestseller in Spanish, one Whitbread nominee - and Robbie Williams.

It includes a book about a book club, whose author has cunningly ensured that hers contains passages of unarguable genius, by including long chunks of Jane Austen - whose Pride and Prejudice has just been voted Radio 4 Woman's Hour's most life changing book.

"There's no doubt that this year's selection of book club entries is the best yet. If anything, the choice is even wider than last time," Richard Madeley commented.

However, the cumulative effect was described by Claire Armitstead, the Guardian's books editor, as "bizarre in the extreme".

She speculated that the life and times of Robbie Williams could only have made the list on the grounds that the star was bound to appear on the show to promote it.

Each of the books will feature in an episode of the Channel 4 show's book club from January. Readers and viewers vote for their favourite, and the winner will be announced at the British Book Awards in April.

The club was launched last year in emulation of the Oprah Winfrey book club in the US, where the queen of confessional television has recently turned back to the classics, and made Anna Karenina an all-American best seller.

What is unquestioned is its effect on sales: sales of Nigel Slater's autobiography, Toast, doubled after it was championed on the programme by Nigella Lawson.

Bookshops ran out of stocks of a comparatively obscure novel, Star of the Sea, by Joseph O'Connor. A new edition had to be hastily printed, and after it eventually finished in second place, sales increased by 350%.

Last year's winner was Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, which went on to sell over 1m copies.

Apart from Robbie and The Jane Austen Book Club, this year's shortlist includes the Booker prize-nominated The Cloud Atlas; the Whitbread-nominated The Promise of Happiness; The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafan, which has already been an international bestseller - but in Spanish; and The Sixth Lamentation, a detective story about a lawyer turned Augustinian monk, written by an Augustinian monk turned lawyer.

"It's absolutely not a snapshot of books you feel you ought to have read," Armitstead said.

"I suppose the one thing you can say is that you certainly can't spot a Richard and Judy book a mile off, the way you can an Oprah book."

Golden reads

· The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafon

· The Time Traveller's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger

· The American Boy, Andrew Taylor

· The Promise of Happiness, Justin Cartwright

· Feel, Robbie Williams/ Chris Heath

· The Jane Austen Book Club, Karen Joy Fowler

· Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell

· The Sixth Lamentation, William Brodrick

· My Sister's Keeper, Jodi Picoult

· Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson, Paula Byrne