Booker Prize shortlist reviewed - Telegraph :: Hilary Mantel - Bring Up The Bodies Having conjured Henry's brainy bovver-boy Thomas Cromwell from his own tomb in her Man Booker winner Wolf Hall (2009), Mantel now does the same service for Anne Boleyn. Bring Up the Bodies might be a fiction, but it is more transparent than those high-narrative histories which cherry-pick their evidence and then fill in factual gaps with educated imaginative leaps. Read our interview with Hilary Mantel :: Alison Moore - The Lighthouse Moore's novel takes the tale of an ordinary, forgettable man, and shows how terrible things happen in the most unassuming surroundings. She conveys the poignancy of small details and delineates perfectly the desperation of unhappy relationships, their mute hostilities and sudden flares. It is this accumulation of the quotidian, in prose as tight as Magnus Mills's, which lends Moore's book its standout nature.  :: Will Self - Umbrella The narrative, which has no breaks or chapters, moves between strands without warning, in subtle shifts that occur from one sentence to the next. Each leap jolts the reader unexpectedly out of kilter. The novel is stuffed with ephemera, but luckily, its overabundance of imagery and sheer verbiage can be made to seem part of its subject matter. Self's refusal to explicate for the reader makes it occasionally arduous going, but it is refreshing to read a book that makes demands rather than "unpacking" itself." :: Tan Twan Eng - The Garden Of Evening Mists The Malaysian writer Tan Twan Eng is an exception in what is generally an Anglo-centric list. His first novel, The Gift of Rain, was described in the Telegraph as an eccentric debut but was none the less longlisted for the Booker Prize. His second book, published by small press Myrmidon, is set in Malaya in 1949 and follows Yun Ling Teoh, a lawyer who has survived a Japanese prisoner of war camp. :: Jeet Thayil - Narcopolis Centred on a squalid drug shack in Bombay, this portmanteau novel picks up strands, weaves them with others, journeys to Mao's China, only to drop us back, mesmerised, right where we began. Ultimately this is a novel of escape. And while this is hardly a groundbreaking interpretation of narcotic abuse, Thayil subtly inhabits lives destined to forever end back to the pipe.