DeLillo's `Underworld' is favourite as shortlist for literary award is announced

US Writer Don DeLillo has emerged as the favourite in the strong eight-book field competing for the fourth International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

The world's richest literary prize, worth £100,000 to the winner - or £75,000 should the work be in translation, thus earning £25,000 for the translator - displayed its confidence when allowing excerpts from the individual novels to announce the shortlist yesterday in the Mansion House, Dublin.

Joining Underworld, DeLillo's 827-page epic of post-Cold War America, on the shortlist are two compatriots: essayist, novelist and critic Cynthia Ozick - the only female contender - and Francisco Goldman. Ozick's snappily New York Jewish novel, The Puttermesser Papers, is the story of the eponymous anti-heroine, a high achiever who isn't really achieving and for whom failures in love have become a way of life. Initially a feminist variation on the adventures of Walter Mitty, the narrative changes course as she sets out to become the mayor of New York.

Guatemalan-American Gold man looks to Conrad and Garcia Marquez in his second novel, The Ordinary Seaman, a traditional and romantic adventure story in which Esteban, a young Nicaraguan war veteran, comes to America to crew a ship which turns out to be little more than a wrecked hulk. Tensions develop as the seamen experience the expected cultural confrontations as the old world discovers the new.

Three English writers, including last year's Booker Prize winner, Ian McEwan, are also shortlisted. McEwan's Enduring Love re counts an obsession as described by the subject of it. Joe Rose, the matter-of-fact and self-absorbed narrator, outlines the events which result in his meeting the strange young man who sets out to take over his life. As a hot-air balloon runs into difficulties, the two run to the rescue. The vivid disaster sequence is the strongest aspect of an otherwise flat narrative.

There should be significant support for Andrew Miller's dazzlingly imaginative historical debut, Ingenious Pain, the story of an 18th-century doctor who is immune to physical pain. The narrative moves from England to Russia and, as well as being a powerfully physical work, it is also a novel of ideas fittingly charting the triumphs and failures of a man of the Enlightenment.

The third English writer is Jim Crace with Quarantine, which won the 1997 Whitbread novel award, having also been short listed for that year's Booker Prize - which it should have won.

A lively retelling of Christ's exile in the desert, Quarantine is really the story of a greedy merchant whose dishonesty is matched only by his bullying behaviour. Atmospheric and often funny, it is an inventive morality play written with humour and deft characterisation.

One of only two shortlisted titles translated into English is Japanese writer Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, translated by Jay Rubin. This hilarious 611-page odyssey of an individual at the mercy of history and society is the most exciting nominee.

Its presence on the list will not only alert readers to a writer with a surreal energy and comic flair, it also draws attention to contemporary Japanese fiction, which at its best resounds with a zany black humour.

If DeLillo, who won the inaugural Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize in 1989 with Libra and has a major international reputation, is challenged, it probably will be by Murakami.

Following its success in Europe, Bernhard Schlik's The Reader, translated from German by Carol Brown Janeway, was equally celebrated on its English publication. An intense, if detached, account of a wartime relationship between a young boy and an older woman, this is a strange, predictable, cold, ultimately unconvincing, exploration of guilt and loyalty which unfolds through flashbacks.

Considering that the long list included outstanding recent European novels such as Russian Andrei Makine's Le Testament Francais, Italian Alessandro Baricco's Silk and Frenchman Jean Rouaud's Of Illustrious Men, as well as Israeli Amos Oz's superb Panther in the Basement, its inclusion is surprising.

The judges, under the non-voting chairman, US historian Allen Weinstein, are Andre Brink, Julia O'Faolain, Tom Shapcott, Bodil Malmsten and Albert Manguel (whose books include, fittingly, A History of Reading).

The winning title will be announced in Dublin on May 17th. Considering that among the 100 long-listed titles - submitted by libraries in 41 countries - failing to make the final eight were books by such internationally established writers as Thomas Pynchon, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Edmund White and Peter Carey, the four long-listed Irish contenders, headed by John Banville and the late Brian Moore, are in distinguished company.