What a relief. Now I won’t feel obliged to read The Enchantress of Florence . Sir Salman may have won both the Booker and the Booker-of-Bookers with Midnight's Children, but he’s a shocking old windbag these days, and he did not make this year’s young, sexy, colourful shortlist.

Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger is a brash, cynical story about the rotten underbelly of the “new” India. Balram has climbed from rural poverty to great riches, but has to do some atrocious things on the way. Atrocities also abound in Steve Toltz’s dazzling A Fraction of the Whole, in which a latterday Ned Kelly makes a brilliant and hilarious confession to his son. This is my favourite, so place your bets now.

This year’s other Indian contender is Amitav Ghosh. Sea of Poppies is set in the 1830s, when British traders have turned the banks of the Ganges into poppy fields for the opium trade with China, and a diverse crew of characters are bound together on an old slave ship.

Less exotic, but equally rich in historical detail, is Philip Hensher’s monumental The Northern Clemency, set in Sheffield in the 1970s. It’s a saga about two families, with the sweep of a Victorian three-decker – a stupendous achievement.

We have come to expect a subtle, slightly off-beat outsider, and this year I would nominate Linda Grant’s The Clothes on Their Backs – basically, think of Anita Brookner with humour.

Another memoir features in Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scriptures . Roseanne is secretly writing her turbulent life story, while trapped in a mental hospital. Barry’s tux last had an outing three years ago, when A Long Long Way was shortlisted, and this novel is fancied to win.

It won’t be easy for the judges – this is one of those rare Booker shortlists without one stinker.

Kate Saunders is a fiction reviewer for The Times

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