The word on the street is that this year's Man Booker Prize is the most unpredictable since, well, last year. For once, however, the rumour-mongers have a point.
The shortlist's only household name is Julian Barnes, whose The Sense of an Ending earns him a fourth nomination - and even Barnes doesn't ring bells as loudly as Ian McEwan, Martin Amis or Salman Rushdie.
Instead, we have two debut novelists - A.D. Miller for Snowdrops and Stephen Kelman for Pigeon English - and two first-time Man Booker nominees: Esi Edugyan's Half Blood Blues and Patrick deWitt's The Sisters Brothers are both sophomore efforts.
That leaves Carol Birch, a relative veteran with 10 novels, one of which, Turn Again Home, was longlisted in 2003. She has now gone one better with Jamrach's Menagerie, which features, among other things, a Victorian taxidermist and animal collector.
If Barnes fails to win (again), someone is going to be more than usually grateful for that GBP60,000 (about HK$730,000) and the career-making prize, chaired this year by Stella Rimington, former head of MI6 and now a novelist in her own right. As Birch says: 'If I win I'll celebrate with a big glass of champagne. On a prosaic note, the financial security it would bring would be a godsend, so sorting out a few debts would be a boring priority.'
For some commentators, the words 'prosaic' and 'boring' describe the shortlist itself. All of this year's novels have obvious drawbacks. One can make a case for almost anyone winning. Then again, one can offer comparably persuasive reasons they might lose.