Your guide to the Booker Prize

Assorted literary grandees will squeeze into their tuxes this evening to compete for the Booker Prize. Of the debut novelists, one previous winner and a brace of old-timers, who stands the best chance of winning?

Swimming Home by Deborah Levy

This is a coiled, unsettling work. A group arrive at their French villa only to find a woman, Kitty Finch, swimming in the pool. Having nowhere to go, she is invited to stay. The book charts the way Kitty’s mental instability wriggles its way into the fabric of the group’s relations: the poet Joe, Isabel (his war-reporter wife), Nina (his teenage daughter) and tag along friends Mitchell and Laura. Written in taut prose, Levy wraps her world in claustrophobia, clinically detailing the depression and friction that ends in tragedy. While not exactly one for laughs, the 160-page length means it rarely drags and often surprises.

Verdict: Parallels with last year’s winner, Sense of an Ending: serious themes made accessible by brevity.