Man Booker prize 2015 – the shortlist - Robert McCrum surveys the contenders

From smart New Yorkers to 70s Jamaican rastas, this year’s impressive contenders reflect the diversity of fiction in English

 Robert McCrum

Sunday 11 October 2015  The Observer

In Tristes Tropiques, Levi-Strauss describes meeting a tribe who don’t know what writing is. To assert his status, the tribe’s chief picks up one of the celebrated anthropologist’s pads and starts scribbling on it, to impress his subjects with his superiority.

Once upon a time, this might have been an apt metaphor for Booker’s judgely antics: tribal leaders affecting an expertise beyond their reach. This year, thankfully, we are not in head-hunting territory. The Booker jury has chosen some powerful finalists. Michael Wood, its chair, has said: “Frankly, they are pretty grim.” But never mind the mood. What’s remarkable here is the polyvalency of English prose in 2015, from the academy to the ghetto, taking in Jamaican patois, Nigerian English and the dialects of Sheffield, Baltimore and New York.

If fiction should be a mirror to our times, here are six books that reflect a world struggling to sustain a shared humanity, through family and friendship, despite gangster violence, self-harming and sibling murder. “What’s quite interesting,” says Professor Wood, “is trying to work out how one can have such pleasure in books with such terrible stuff.”

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