Booker list of 20 novels pits youth against age

Junior and senior stars of fiction enter the Booker prize fray today, with Zadie Smith joining Anita Brookner on the long-list of 20 novels in competition for this year's award.

The panel, chaired by the academic and broadcaster Lisa Jardine and including the comedian David Baddiel, has chosen a score of contenders that pit youth against age. Nominees range from the revered Irish writer William Trevor (born 1928) to the Bermuda-born, Nottingham-based newcomer Jon McGregor (born 1976).

True to Booker form, the long-list also promises to raise a storm of protest by omitting several widely fancied titles. Among this year's absentees is A S Byatt's A Whistling Woman, the novel that completes her acclaimed quartet on the lives of postwar women.

Professor Jardine commended "a long-list of real range and depth" yesterday. The judges for the prize, now worth £50,000 and sponsored by the Man Group of City investment managers, will draw from this selection a shortlist of six on 24 September. The prize itself will be awarded on 22 October.

No choice was more predictable than The Autograph Man, Zadie Smith's follow-up to the sensationally successful White Teeth, although her publishers have yet to release copies of this second slice of mixed-up, multicultural London. In contrast, Anita Brookner (a Booker victor in 1984) has only recently swung back into favour: The Next Big Thing, her 20th novel, won warmer praise than any of her novels since the 1980s.

The list rewards a group of novelists who also enjoy a high profile as journalists, including three from The Independent. Philip Hensher's The Mulberry Empire explores the British military disaster in Afghanistan in the 1840s; Howard Jacobson's Whose Sorry Now? mixes a typically high-octane blend of comedy, pathos and regret; and Will Self updates Oscar Wilde to 1980s high society in Dorian. Linda Grant, the Orange Prize winner in 2000, returns to the migrant histories of her native Liverpool in Still Here. Sarah Waters, a strong Orange hopeful this year for her Victorian mystery Fingersmith, appears in the Booker frame for the first time.

The bookmaker William Hill made Jacobson early favourite to take the prize at 4/1. Smith and William Boyd for Any Human Heart were named joint second favourites at 5/1.

Among the darker horses, the Canadian Yann Martel's Life of Pi, an amazing fable of a shipwrecked boy adrift with a Bengal tiger, ravished the reviewers. And with Peacetime (set in the eerie aftermath of the war), the Yorkshire writer Robert Edric has at last matched his enormous acclaim among the literati with visibility in the prize arena.

At least a couple of the year's most admired novels (by John McGahern and Janice Galloway) looked almost too perfect as classic Booker candidates, which could have worked against their chances of making the list. They still richly deserved a place. So here, to stir the Booker pot, is The Independent's shadow shortlist of six novels of 2002 that will never feature in the official history: A S Byatt, A Whistling Woman (Chatto & Windus); Justin Cartwright, White Lightning (Sceptre); Anne Enright, The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (Cape); Janice Galloway, Clara (Cape); Romesh Gunesekera, Heaven's Edge (Bloomsbury); John McGahern, That They May Face The Rising Sun (Faber).

The books

Dannie Abse: The Strange Case of Dr Simmonds and Dr Glass
A doctor is infatuated with a young, unhappily married patient in the 1950s

John Banville: Shroud
A celebrated West Coast academic has a dark secret

Joan Barfoot: Critical Injuries
Faked robbery unites a middle-aged discontent with a teenager

William Boyd: Any Human Heart
The life, loves and travels of a writer seen through his intimate journals

Anita Brookner: The Next Big Thing
A 73-year-old considers what he is going to do with the rest of his life

Robert Edric: Peacetime
A former army captain arrives on the postwar Fenland coast

Michael Frayn: Spies
Two friends see spies everywhere on the home front during the war

Linda Grant: Still Here
Angry middle-aged woman is attracted to a stranger

Philip Hensher: The Mulberry Empire
A young Scot plays the "Great Game" of imperial politics

Howard Jacobson: Who's Sorry Now
Middle-aged Jewish Lothario plans a wife-swap

Yann Martel: Life of Pi
Pi roughs it in a lifeboat with a hyena, monkey, zebra and tiger

Jon McGregor: If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things
A terrible event in a town on a summer evening

Rohinton Mistry: Family Matters
A 79-year-old Parsi widower's domestic conflict in Bombay

Will Self: Dorian: an Imitation
Set against the Aids crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, a reworking of Oscar Wilde's classic novel

Carol Shields: Unless
A happy family's eldest daughter becomes a bag lady in Toronto

Zadie Smith: The Autograph Man
An existential tour around the hollow things of modernity

Colin Thubron: To The Last City
Five ill-prepared travellers trek through the Peruvian Andes

William Trevor: The Story of Lucy Gault
Protestants in rural Cork in 1921, a time of turmoil

Sarah Waters: Fingersmith
Three-part tale of two orphaned girls in south London

Tim Winton: Dirt Music
Fortysomething mother and brooding poacher in west Australia