The decision to leave out Peter Carey, Andrew O’Hagan and David Mitchell came as a relief to bookmakers. A large number of bets had been placed on Mitchell, who had also been the bookies’ hottest-ever favourite in 2004, when he was beaten by Alan Hollinghurst. But almost all of the big-name contenders for the prize were left off of the shortlist, having been selected for the initial long-list last month.

Carey, the Australian bestselling novelist, was widely expected to be shortlisted and looked set to break records by winning for a third time. With J. M Coetzee, he is the only author to have won the Booker twice.

Instead, this year’s judges went for six authors who are yet to become household names. One of them is a first-time author, Hisham Matar, a Libyan who has lived in London since 1986. He was chosen for In the Country of Men, a claustrophic story about a young boy growing up in Libya under Colonel Gaddafi’s repressive regime.

It is based on his own devastating experience. When he was a student, his father, a Libyan dissident living in Cairo, was taken back to Tripoli, imprisoned and tortured. There has been no word of him since 1995. Hermione Lee, Chair of the judges and Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature at Oxford, expressed astonishment that it was a first novel.

The other five shortlisted books are The Inheritance Of Loss by Kiran Desai; The Secret River by Kate Grenville; Carry Me Down by M. J. Hyland, Mother’s Milk by Edward St Aubyn, and The Night Watch by Sarah Waters.

Waters is probably the best known of the shortlisted authors. Two of her novels, Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith have been adapted for the screen by the BBC. Fingersmith was also shortlisted for the Man Booker prize and the Orange Prize in 2002. Her latest work is the story of four Londoners with a past in the 1940s.Ms Desai is the daughter of the author Anita Desai, who has herself been shortlisted for the prize three times. Born in India, her second novel tells the story of an embittered judge living in the northeastern Himalayas whose life is transformed by the arrival of his orphaned granddaughter.

Carey’s absence offers two less well-known Australian novelists the chance to emerge from his shadow.

In Sydney-based Kate Grenville’s novel a 19th century waterman on the Thames is transported to New South Wales where he is shocked to find aboriginal people already living on the land he takes for himself.

M. J. Hyland’s Carry Me Down is the story of a boy with a gift for spotting lies, an unusual talent which develops into a violent and frightening fixation. The author, who was born in London to Irish parents, moved to Australia as a child. She went on to practise law for six years before becoming a novelist. She has since won the Sydney Morning Herald award for Best Australian novelist.

St Aubyn’s forbidding autobiography is always a consideration when reading his work. From a grand family he was raped by his father as a child, became a dedicated heroin addict at 16 and, after a dandyish career at Oxford University, contemplated suicide at 28.

His stylishly written tale of a once illustrious family undermined by broken promises picks up the story of Patrick Melrose, the central character of his earlier novel Some Hope.

This time, the bookmakers were torn. William Hill installed Waters as 2/1 favourite to win, with Desai as the 7/1 “outsider”. Ladbrokes also picked Waters as its new 6/4 favourite, but it selected Matar and Desai as 4/1 joint second favourites.

Professor Lee said: “Each of these novels has what we as judges were most looking for — a distinctive, original voice and audacious imagination that takes readers to undiscovered countries of the mind, a strong power of storytelling and a historical truthfulness.”

The overall winner of the £50,000 prize will be announced on October 10.

SO, HAVE THEY READ THEM ALL?

The Man Booker Prize shortlist was whittled down to six from a total of 112 entries (Dalya Alberge writes).

Each of the five judges — the poet and novelist Simon Armitage, the novelist Candia McWilliam, the critic Anthony Quinn and the actress Fiona Shaw, chaired by the biographer and academic Hermione Lee — claimed that they had read all of them.

Shaw joked: “I’ve done very little else.” But, when asked whether they had read every one of them from beginning to end, Professor Lee admitted that she had not done so with a number of them.

She said: “There were a few books early on that I did give up because I could see I was simply not going to find any value in them. It is on my conscience that I didn’t quite turn to their last pages.”

Read reviews of the shortlisted books here

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy