The winner of the 2005 Man Booker Prize for Fiction will be announced tomorrow. The Post's critics assess the contenders for one of the most prestigious awards for English-language fiction THE MOST EAGERLY anticipated award in the literary calendar reaches its climax tomorrow with the announcement of the winner of the 2005 Man Booker Prize for Fiction at a ceremony in London. In a year The Observer newspaper has described as 'the richest for contemporary British and Commonwealth fiction since the launch of the prize in 1969', the panel of five judges has whittled a longlist of 17 contenders down to six finalists. The Booker, which has come to be seen as the ultimate literary showdown, aims to reward the best novel of the year written by a citizen of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland. Heavyweights to have fallen by the wayside already this year include two-time winner J. M. Coetzee, Ian McEwan, whose Saturday was an early favourite and who won the prize in 1998, and Salman Rushdie, whose Midnight's Children not only won the Booker Prize in 1981, but also won the so-called Booker of Bookers in 1993. For the winner, the Booker will bring prize money of #50,000 (about $680,000) and worldwide acclaim. It's recognised as the ultimate accolade by many writers. As 1996 winner Graham Swift said: 'Prizes don't make writers and writers don't write to win prizes, but in the near-glut of literary awards now on offer, the Booker remains special. It's the one which, if we're completely honest, we most covet.' Here are the contenders, their odds and what the South China Morning Post's critics have to say about them: John Banville The Sea Picador Odds: 7/1 After the death of his wife from cancer, ageing art historian Max Morden returns to a small seaside town, where he's haunted by the events of a childhood summer there that marked his coming of age and ended in tragedy. Max - 'a man of leisurely interests and scant ambition' - recalls that summer when, as a working-class boy, he was taken into the bosom of the affluent Grace family: parents Carlo and Connie and their twin children, mute Myles and Chloe, 'the vanishing point around which everything converged'. The Sea is thick with atmosphere, allusion and evocative imagery, and John Banville's vignettes delight, but he tends to laud style over story and suspense is conspicuous by its absence. Ireland's most stylistically elaborate author, Banville writes in the tradition of his mentor, Samuel Beckett. Born in 1945 in Wexford, where he was educated, he was literary editor at the Irish Times between 1988 and 1999. Dr Copernicus, his fictional portrait of the 15th-century Polish astronomer, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction) in 1976, and in 1981 he scooped the Guardian Fiction Prize for Kepler, his fictional life of 16th-century German astronomer Johannes Kepler. The Book of Evidence won him the Guinness Peat Aviation Book Award in 1989 and a place on the Booker Prize shortlist. Julian Barnes Arthur & George Jonathan Cape Odds: 5/4 Mining Britain's rich history of bureaucratic blundering, the third-time-lucky Booker nominee Julian Barnes has delivered a fictionalised two-hander featuring Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, and George Edalji, a quiet Birmingham lawyer of Indian- Scottish descent who has been wrongfully accused and convicted of livestock mutilation. To even the casual observer, the evidence was flimsy. An outraged Doyle joined a growing chorus against the injustice. Barnes digresses little from the facts, using them to imagine the motivations and moralities of post-Victorian England, a century ago. Oxford-educated Barnes, 59, has written nine novels and two collections of short stories. Flaubert's Parrot was short-listed for the Booker in 1984; England, England in 1998. Barnes is a highly respected writer who's been unlucky to have faced such stiff competition in his previous Booker outings. He's hot favourite to take the prize this year, and he'll probably win - if only in recognition of his body of work. Unfortunately, he shouldn't win for this book, masterfully crafted though it is. Arthur & George lacks the brilliance and originality of Barnes' best writing. Still, it's a very English tale from a respectable publishing house - which is probably enough to carry the day. Sebastian Barry A Long Long Way Faber & Faber Odds: 8/1 A Long Long Way is a war novel that shows how battle lines can fork and become blurred, especially when participants have to deal with personal conflicts and divided loyalties. It's also the coming-of-age story of Willie Dunne, a sensitive 18-year-old who leaves Ireland in 1914 to fight against Germany. Pride turns to anguish, however, when he returns to face the Easter 1916 uprising in Dublin, which pits him against his own people. War, described in unflinching detail, forever marks Willie, who wants nothing more than to become a builder and get married. Family and Irish history are major influences in the work of Dublin-born playwright, poet and novelist Sebastian Barry. Educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where he was a Writer Fellow in 1995-1996, he's feted for, among other plays, The Steward of Christendom (1995), about his loyalist great-grand- father Thomas Dunne, a chief super- intendent of the Dublin Metropolitan Police from 1913-22. The Dunne family also features in the novel Annie Dunne as well as A Long Long Way, which has received the equivalent of standing ovations, although some reviewers would have preferred a little less description of war-time horrors. Barry, 50, is the son of architect Francis Barry and actress Joan O'Hara. Kazuo Ishiguro Never Let Me Go Faber & Faber Odds: 3/1 Part-science fiction, part-morality tale, part-love story, Never Let Me Go is a creepy, if touching, story about clones and organ farming in late 1990s Britain. The horror involves not only what's going on in a so-called privileged estate called Hailsham, where the characters spend most of their lives, but how its progeny accept their destiny. Some display a desire not to be extinguished and the urge to know where they're from - instincts that lead to heartbreaking searches for 'possibles' (humans from which the duplicates have been created). Improbable as the plot may sound, the story will have readers concerned about those unfortunate enough to have been raised simply to serve others. Kazuo Ishiguro, born in Nagasaki in 1954, emigrated to Britain at the age of five and dreamed of becoming a singer-songwriter. Instead, he chose novels, and is among the literary elite to have emerged from the University of East Anglia, where he came under the influence of Angela Carter and Malcolm Bradbury. Often referred to as a writer's writer, Ish (as he's known) won the Booker Prize in 1989 for Remains of the Day, and was shortlisted for the award in 2000 for When We Were Orphans. His third Booker outing has had mixed reviews, although the good outweigh the ambivalent. Ali Smith The Accidental Hamish Hamilton Odds: 12/1 The Accidental is about Ambra, the visitor who stays on, triggering the action within the Smart family, holidaying in Norfolk in 2003. Enigmatic Amber has psychic powers that unleash the potential of the two Smart adults and two adolescents. She may also be a con artist collaborating with robbers who empty the Smart house. That amounts to a run-of-the-mill tale, but another dimension is added by the suggestion that Amber represents the spirit of the rebellious 1968 generation. The characters are quirky, the writing vivid, but for this reader Ali Smith hasn't achieved her aim of writing a book 'so solid you can hammer it and it doesn't fall apart'. Smith was born into a working-class family in Inverness, Scotland, in 1962. After taking a degree in Aberdeen, she began a PhD in post-modern narrative at Cambridge, which she didn't complete. For a time she was a university lecturer in English literature, a task she found uncongenial. She's written a number of plays, but for more than a decade has concentrated on novels and short stories. The first of her three books of stories, Free Love and Other Stories, won the Saltire First Book Award, and her second novel Hotel World won the Encore Prize and was shortlisted for the Orange and Booker prizes. The Accidental is her third novel. Zadie Smith On Beauty Hamish Hamilton Odds: 4/1 On Beauty is an attempt at a contemporary retelling of the Edwardian masterpiece by E. M. Forster, Howard's End. Whereas Forster was concerned with class, Smith engages with race relations. In fact, she delivers a spunky reversal of racial stereotyping: a white liberal and a black conservative duel with each other in the rarified world of Rembrandt studies, even as their spouses - one terminally ill, the other floundering in the wake of an extra-marital affair - strike up a deep friendship. What starts as an engaging examination of personal relationships gets jettisoned for campus politics, painting debates and the plight of the underprivileged black. Zadie Smith was born in North London to an English father and a Jamaican mother. She read English at Cambridge, graduating in 1997. Her debut, White Teeth, won multiple awards and made her an instant literary star in 2000. In 2003, she was nominated by Granta magazine as one of the 20 best young British novelists. With her third novel, On Beauty, she makes the Booker shortlist for the first time. Although it's generally been applauded, some have accused her of cannibalising. In a recent interview with New York magazine, Smith savagely attacked England and the English. A Booker win looks unlikely for this chronicler of multiculturalism.