Booker Prize class of 2017 deserves a fail

The Booker judges have one job - to choose the year's best novels - but this bewildering shortlist from the class of 2017 has contrived to lose the strongest titles from a longlist that had already overlooked some of the year's most exciting releases (Gwendoline Riley's First Love, Sally Rooney's Conversations with Friends) in favour of subprime output from famous names.

US writer Paul Auster finds himself inexplicably still in the running for the £50,000 award with 4321, a coming-of-age narrative that replays the life of a conspicuously Auster-like hero four times over. It's brick-thick and stodgy.

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid, who was shortlisted in 2007 for The Reluctant Fundamentalist, also made the cut. It's better than Auster's turkey, but it too fails to deliver on an intriguing set-up. It has a science-fictional premise: lovers trying to flee the sectarian conflict in an unnamed city find black doorways in thin air, which take them to far-off countries. But the excitement drains away, and you're left wondering whether Hamid's thought experiment - "What if migration were easy?" - might have made a better essay.

There are some debut novels. Emily Fridlund's History of Wolves captures the pitfalls of consuming, indiscriminate teenage desire in its story of a 14-year-old girl in Minnesota who falls in with Christian Scientists and their small son. It's full of high-flown description.

Overwriting is a problem in another first novel on the shortlist, Elmet by 29-year-old Fiona Mozley, who wrote the violent elegy for the loss of rural community while working in a bookshop in York.

These books were mysteriously preferred ahead of Mike McCormack's longlisted Solar Bones - a monologue by a dead Irish engineer - which has already won the Goldsmiths Prize.

And why didn't Sebastian Barry's Costa-winning Days Without End, a Wild West romance about a cross-dressing refugee, or Colson Whitehead's alternative-history take on slavery, The Underground Railroad, already a Pulitzer winner, make it on to the shortlist? Was it reckoned that they had won their prizes already?

So what were the judges thinking? Clearly they've tried to favour novels that take a narrative gamble, that have been overlooked by other prizes, and that examine the UK beyond the metropolis. In which case, it's bizarre that they've shunned Jon McGregor's longlisted Reservoir 13 - a hypnotic time-lapse view of village life in the Peak District after a girl disappears - which ticks all their own boxes.

It was never going to be a vintage year, but this shortlist is just baffling. - The Daily Telegraph