The judges have a hard task at this week’s Booker prize ceremony with five of the six shortlisted books worthy winners, though Percival Everett’s James – a retelling of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn – is the title to put your money on

Seven months to read more than 150 novels... how do the Booker judges do it? It’s “impossible”, said Robert Webb, serving on last year’s panel: “You finish as many as you can and the other ones you put to one side after a respectable but undisclosed fraction has been read.” Well, maybe, but somehow I doubt this has been the approach of the novelist Yiyun Li, one of this year’s judges, who once led an 85-day lockdown book club online to read War and Peace, a novel she rereads each year.

Either way, the 2024 panel, chaired by the artist and memoirist Edmund de Waal (The Hare With Amber Eyes), have whittled their tottering book stacks down to an excellent six-strong shortlist, five of which would make a worthy winner on Tuesday 12 November.