The 2009 Man Booker shortlist

Hilary Mantel is shortlisted for Wolf Hall, a piece of historical fiction centring on Thomas Cromwell, who was the successor to Cardinal Wolsey as Henry VIII’s most trusted adviser as the king tries to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. “This is a beautiful and profoundly humane book, a dark mirror held up to our own world,” wrote Olivia Laing in the Observer. “Hilary Mantel is one of our bravest as well as most brilliant writers”
Read the Guardian's review of Wolf Hall, by Christopher Tayler Photograph: Public Domain

The first author to win the Booker prize twice, JM Coetzee is in with a third chance with Summertime. This latest novel completes his trilogy of fictionalised memoir begun with Boyhood and Youth, detailing the story of a young English biographer who is writing a book about the late author John Coetzee. Coetzee won the Nobel prize for literature in 2003
Read the Guardian's review of Summertime, by James Meek Photograph: Public Domain

Sarah Waters, twice shortlisted for the Booker and the Orange prize, is in the running again with her fifth novel, The Little Stranger, a ghost story set in post-war Warwickshire
Read the Guardian's review of The Little Stranger, by Hilary Mantel Photograph: Public Domain

AS Byatt, who won the Booker in 1990 for Possession, is up this time for The Children's Book. It deals with intertwined lives of four families at the turn of the 20th century as they experiment with bohemian living, each with their own secrets. The Sunday Times said it was easily the best book Byatt had written since Possession; the Guardian called it “staggeringly detailed and charged”
Read the Guardian's review of The Children's Book, by Alex Clark Photograph: Public Domain

Simon Mawer makes the cut with The Glass Room, an historical novel set in Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s. As war looms, newlyweds Viktor and Liesel Landauer, a Jew married to a gentile, move to a house on a hill with a unique glass room
Read the Guardian's review of The Glass Room, by Ian Sansom Photograph: Public Domain

Poet-novelist Adam Foulds is shortlisted for The Quickening Maze, a historical reconstruction of the meeting of the poets John Clare and Alfred Tennyson at a lunatic asylum in Epping Forest. Foulds has already won the Costa poetry prize for his verse history of the Mau Mau uprisings, The Broken Word, and was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 2008
Read the Guardian's review of The Quickening Maze, by Andrew Motion Photograph: Public Domain