UNCOVERED: Each of the six booker novels does something unique - The Untold Story

As the Guardian’s fiction editor, I’ve been writing about the Booker prize for years. But this time, I was privileged to go behind the curtain, as part of the judging team along with artist and writer Edmund de Waal, musician Nitin Sawhney, and writers Yiyun Li and Sara Collins. The longlisting stage was a delight: choosing the books we wanted to spotlight. (Though of course we’d happily have produced a directors’ cut of 30 books or more.) Losing some of them at the shortlist meeting was harder, though as we talked about each book, unanimity fairly quickly evolved. Each of these six novels does something unique; weighing them against each other to find a winner will be trickier still.