This year's Man Booker Prize appears set to be one of the most sedate literary bunfights of all time, writes Eileen Battersby.
It is a selection so quiet and so non-controversial it is to be hoped sufficient interest will be sustained until the announcement of the shortlist early next month.
In fact a longlist such as this might convince the Booker organisers to return to the old style approach - having a six-book shortlist announcement followed a month later by the winner.
But in the age of hype, hype breeds like germs. Dublin-born writer Anne Enright is the only Irish contender with her novel The Gatheringin which the nine surviving members of the Hegarty family assemble in Dublin for a wake.
Veronica tells the story not only of her late brother, Liam, but of the family itself. It is a candid narrative with echoes of Roddy Doyle's The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, although it is pitched at a wider, less psychologically toned self absorption.
Enright is a confident performer and this book lives off the page. She is joined by one former International Impac Dublin Literary award winner, Nicola Barker, and a former Booker prize winner, Ian McEwan.
It is interesting to note that the judges chose Enright's version of family dysfunction Irish-style over a British variation on the same theme. Jane Feaver's According to Ruthwas an outstanding debut published this year and told the story of an English family falling apart because of the incompatible parents.
According to Ruth is a remarkable book and a very convincing one. Booker has made many mistakes but few quite as obvious as this one.
If Feaver is not that well known, Sri Lankan-born Michael Ondaatje, author of Booker winner The English Patient, is very famous.
His new novel, Divisadero, is about two sisters who once shared an intimacy but have collapsed into estrangement and is set during the Gold Rush years in California. It was an obvious Booker contender but has not even made the longlist.
The horrors of the second World War continue to dominate world fiction and British fiction in particular. Both AN Wilson and Peter Ho Davies have made the longlist with respective novels based on the war.
Ironically, the strongest novel so far this year to deal with the second World War is South African Justin Cartwright's The Song Before It Is Sung, which draws on the failed Junker plot to assassinate Hitler on July 20th, 1944.
It is a layered narrative, characteristically detailed and sophisticatedly handled by Cartwright. Another notable exclusion also drawing on the war as a theme is AL Kennedy's Day. However, her novel does not achieve the coherence of Cartwright's.
There is no doubt that this year's longlist reflects the increasingly multiracial composition of British fiction. One of the strongest books published in Britain this year is by Pakistani born Mohsin Hamid. The Reluctant Fundamentalistis his second book and it is an important one.
It was published last February, a couple of months before Don de Lillo's Falling Man. Both books tackle the theme of international terrorism. While Falling Manhas been justifiably hailed as a major book, Hamid lacks de Lillo's stylistic urgency. However, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a pointed, almost allegorical book looks to Albert Camus and his classic work The Fall.
As expected, McEwan, one of Britain's most established, gifted and - it must be said - contentious writers, must start favourite with On Chesil Beach, which offers a graphic study of the essential differences between a woman's need for love and a man's interest in sex.
A young couple discover that romance and sex don't quite add up to the same thing. It is a book which readers have tended to love or dislike but there is no doubting McEwan's psychological astuteness.
McEwan is expected to make the shortlist - and should. The appearance of Mohsin Hamid, however, is exciting. The Reluctant Fundamentalistis a book which reflects the society of international terror in which we now live. Its message is obvious - look for the enemy, he is everywhere and in all of us.
In a quiet Booker year this is the book to look to.