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Why this year's Man Booker Prize shortlist is too much hard work

This year’s Man Booker judges must be the most independent and high-minded ever assembled — for the shortlist they have selected, from their already rather wacky longlist, will be the despair of booksellers.

The judges have surprisingly dropped the two novels that looked to be the strongest contenders and have already proved the most popular among readers —Warlight by Michael Ondaatje (the acclaimed author of The English Patient, for which he was awarded The Golden Man Booker Prize earlier this year) and Normal People , the rapturously reviewed second novel by young Irish writer Sally Rooney, which sold an impressive 5,495 copies last week.

Instead, they have gone for novels that to many potential readers will look like hard work — almost a deliberate caricature of the unreadability the Booker has so often been derided for delivering.

As the chair, Kwame Anthony Appiah proudly says: “Each one explores the anatomy of pain.”

The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner is set in a women’s prison, while Washington Black by Esi Edugyan tells of an escape from child slavery.

The Overstory by Richard Powers is an evangelical eco-epic, and our reviewer Ian Thomson found Everything Under by Daisy Johnson hard-going at times.

The Long Take by Robin Robertson tells the tale of a D-Day veteran with PTSD.

Milkman by Belfast-born Anna Burns draws on the Troubles. “Her words pull us into the daily violence of her world — people killed by state hit squads,” enthuses Appiah.

So this is a shortlist that lays down quite a challenge to the booksellers — and to readers too.