The Man Booker Prize, Britain’s most prestigious literary award, has always been the preserve of a small coterie of elite judges: critics, novelists and professors with the willingness to plough their way through more than 100 nominated books and the confidence to decide which is the best. The British public love a good vote, though, and this year the Man Booker committee have followed the lead of the BRIT Awards and the British Book Awards: it is us, the great unwashed, who will decide which novel wins the second Best of the Booker award (a prize given to the best winner since the prize’s inception in 1969). Of course, they’ve narrowed the field for us, and rather shockingly excluded one of the most popular Booker winners of all time, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, but we still have the power to decide whether Midnight’s Children stays in the top slot (it won the first Best of the Booker in 1993) or whether it is toppled by the literary might of Pat Barker, Peter Carey, J. M. Coetzee, J. G. Farrell or Nadine Gordimer. Voting continues until July 8 on www.themanbookerprize.com.

But do the Booker judges always get it right? Do the 41 Booker winners really represent the absolute cream of the crop? Or are the real gems lurking in the shortlists, unfairly pipped to the post by flashier flashes-in-the-pan? Scott Pack, former head buyer at Waterstone’s, voracious reader and irrepressible commentator on publishing, bookselling and writing, has set up his own alternative underdog vote on his Me And My Big Mouth blog: The Best of the Rest of the Booker. A hastily thrown together but undisputably bookish panel have decided on a shortlist of 10 novels that should have won the Booker but didn’t – and it’s now up to the public to vote for their favourite. The prize? “I will bake a cake for the winner.” writes Pack. “Assuming they are . . . prepared to accept a cake from me. Lemon drizzle is my speciality but I can be flexible on that. One of them is bound to be allergic to something.” The winner will be announced at the same time as the official Best of the Booker winner, on July 10.

Judging from the votes so far, and the comments left on the site, at the moment the odds are on David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (Pack’s own favourite) to win. One voter writes “[Mitchell’s] writing is unique and he's probably the only author I actually read slowly - because I can't bear to miss a single perfect sentence. I still can't believe it didn't win. Wrong. Just wrong.” Panelist John Self, though, acknowledges that the bestsellers have an advantage: “The problem with public polls like this is that you can only vote for books you have read, which means that the big sellers tend to get the nod over other books which may be of higher quality but that simply didn't sell in such high numbers.”

Vote for the Best of the Rest of the Booker here

The Best of the Rest of the Booker: the shortlist

Arthur & George by Julian Barnes

Atonement by Ian McEwan

Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

The Master by Colm Toibin

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Restraint of Beasts by Magnus Mills

Waterland by Graham Swift

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