Man Booker prize 2013. The longlist

We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo
Bulawayo’s first novel is an expansion of her Caine prize-winning short story about Zimbabwean street children. Her narrator, Darling, escapes to Amer- ica, but finds that material wealth doesn’t translate into happiness.

Unexploded by Alison MacLeod
In 1940, Brighton family the Beaumonts are expecting a German invasion any day, while down the road “enemy aliens” are detained. One of them – an exiled “degenerate artist” – will come to change their lives. Due out in September, Unexploded is the followup to The Wave Theory of Angels, which combined medieval theology and contemporary physics.

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
This eclectic, meditative novel from Ozeki, also a film-maker and Zen Buddhist priest, weaves many different stories around the discovery of a Ja- panese teenager’s diary washed up on the shore in British Columbia in a Hello Kitty lunchbox. Was she a tsunami victim? A suicide? Zen wisdom may hold the answer ...

Almost English by Charlotte Mendelson
Mandelson's previous novel, When We Were Bad, was nominated for the Orange prize in 2008. In her fourth book, out in mid-August, 16-year-old Marina leaves the cramped London flat she shares with her troubled mother and elderly Hungarian relatives for a traditional English public school. Is she fated to be an outsider at school as well as home?

Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw (Fourth Estate)
Aw's tale of four Malaysians looking for opportunity and reinvention in Shanghai explores individual lives and loves in the storm of global capitalism as the world’s centre of gravity shifts to the east. Guardian reviewer Amin- atta Forna called it “The Way We Live Now for our times”. Aw’s 2005 debut, The Harmony Silk Factory, won the Costa first novel award.

The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín
Tóibín, who has been shortlisted for the Booker twice before and recently won the Costa novel award for Brooklyn, is one of the most established writers on the list. In this slim, surprising novel the Virgin Mary gives her per- spective on life as Jesus’s mother.

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri
From the hugely acclaimed – and bestselling – Indian-American author, The Lowland is not out until September. A story of two brothers from Calcutta, what the publisher assures us is an “epic” story follows one of them into the militant far-left Naxalite movement. The group's violent campaign to em- power India's landless divides the brothers with tragic results.

TransAtlantic by Colum McCannTransAtlantic, which begins with the first non-stop transatlantic flight from Newfoundland to County Galway in 1919, began as a short story in the New Yorker in April 2012, and developed into a longer work in three parts. It takes in historical vignettes from the Great Famine and the Good Friday agreement of 1998. Theo Tait in the Guardian called McCann, best known for Let the Great World Spin, “a very gifted, charming writer; in full, rhaps- odic-onrush mode, he is hard to resist.”

The Marrying of Chani Kaufman by Eve Harris
A debut novel, The Marrying of Chani Kaufman draws on Harris’s own ex- perience of north-west London’s ultra-orthodox Jewish community. Nine- teen-year-old Chani has never had physical contact with a man, but is ex- pected to marry a stranger. Soon buried secrets, fear and sexual desire emerge in what the publisher Sandstone describes as “a story of liberation and choice”. Although Sandstone is a small operation, its tracklist includes The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers, which won the Arthur C Clarke award – and was also longlisted for the 2011 Booker.

The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan
A debut novel set in a small town in the aftermath of Ireland’s financial col- lapse and told through a chorus of 21 different voices, The Spinning Heart has been compared to Synge and Patrick McCabe.

Harvest by Jim Crace
Veteran author Crace has said that this atmospheric tale of a vanished Eng- land will be his final novel. It focuses on a nameless village undergoing en- closure, whereby “the sheaf gives way to sheep” and peasant farmers are expelled from land once held in common. Crace’s descriptions of hard- scrabble lives in the ever-rolling seasons are both mythic and particular.

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
Following her bewitching 2009 debut The Rehearsal, the second novel from New Zealand wunderkind Catton, out in September, is a dizzyingly ambi- tious doorstop of a book. Set in the 19th-century New Zealand goldfields, it takes in astronomy, ghosts, unsolved crimes and much more.

The Kills by Richard House
The Kills is a crime and conspiracy novel told in four books which begins with a man on the run and ends with a burned body. If this sounds rather conventional, don't be misled: House is also an artist and film-maker, and the narrative of The Kills extends into short films, spinning off the written plot in what the author describes as “footnotes”.