The Man Booker longlist for 2015 has been a controversial one. Two years ago, a change of rule allowed writers all over the world to be eligible, so long as they wrote in English. Partly as a result, the list is dominated by writers from the US – a total of six out of 13.

However, the celebrated diversity of theme endures, and even a work of outright speculative fiction makes an appearance. First-time novelists are on the list, one of them a literary agent. And of course, India’s own Anuradha Roy’s third novel makes it to the longlist, too. Here’s your quick guide.

Did You Ever Have a Family, Bill Clegg, USA
Clegg, who is based in New York City, worked for the literary agency William Morris Endeavor for eight years before starting his own. The Clegg Agency represents some major talent, including Akhil Sharma, author of Family Life. Clegg has previously written two memoirs: Portrait of an Addict As a Young Man (2011), about his addiction to crack-cocaine and alcohol, and Ninety Days (2013), about his struggle to recover from this addiction.

Did You Ever Have a Family is Clegg’s debut novel, one that took him seven years to finish. It is set in Connecticut, and concerns the survival of a handful of characters in the wake of a life-changing tragedy. The novel so impressed Clegg’s US publishers at Gallery Books that they created a whole new imprint called Scout Press, with Clegg’s debut as its first publication.

The Green Road, Anne Enright, Ireland
The Dublin-based Enright’s first published book was her collection of short stories, The Portable Virgin (1991). She attained renown after her fourth novel, The Gathering (2007), was awarded the Booker. As an MA student of creative writing, Enright studied under Angela Carter and Malcolm Bradbury. Before she started to write full time, Enright was a television producer and director.

The Green Road is her sixth novel, and, like The Gathering, is centered on the reunion of a large Irish family, comprising the matriarch Rosaleen Madigan, and her four children. The first part of the novel explores separate times in the lives of each of the four siblings, and the second part sees the family reunite in their home for what is perhaps the final time, before it is sold. With this novel, Enright continues her insightful explorations of family life.

A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James, Jamaica
Though only three novels old, Marlon James, a teacher of English and creative writing, has already been hailed as one of the great Jamaican writers. In fact, his previous novel, The Book of Night Women, is quite often called the greatest Jamaican novel ever written.

A Brief History of Seven Killings is set in a watershed time in the Jamaica of the 1970s and 80s, sunshine islands plagued by burgeoning gun violence, international espionage and political instability, with the music of Bob Marley haunting the background.

The book looks at the assassination attempt on Marley, referred throughout the book as “the singer”, and its aftermath. James tells the story from the points of view of a multitude of characters, over 70, in fact, bringing to the fore many competing voices and adding to a layered understanding of Jamaica.

The Moor's Account, Laila Lalami, USA
Lalami grew up in Morocco, and moved first to the UK and then to the US, where she now lives. She teaches creative writing at the University of California at Riverside. Her opinion pieces and essays have been widely published, and she is the author of two novels other than The Moor’s Account. 

The first of these is Hope and Other Pursuits, about the journeys of four Moroccans – Murad, Faten, Halima, and Aziz – who want to migrate to Europe. Secret Son’s title refers to its protagonist, Youssef El Meki, who finds out at the age of 19 that he’s really the son of a rich man; the novel explores the complex origins of fundamentalism and liberalism, class and identity.

A chronicle written by Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, one of the few survivors of the conquistador Narváez’s 1500s colonial expedition from Spain to Florida, contains the briefest of mentions of a black slave, Estabanico. Lalami’s historical fiction in The Moor’s Account is a fictionalised account from the point of view of Estabanico, and challenges historical, dehumanising representations of enslaved black people and native Americans.

Satin Island, Tom McCarthy, UK
Writer and artist Tom McCarthy was born and raised in London, where he lives. He studied literature and worked various odd jobs while living in Prague and Berlin. He became seriously interested in the visual arts in his early twenties. His debut novel, Remainder, was rejected by major publishers in the UK, but gained critical acclaim after a small press from Paris published it four years after it was written. He founded the International Necronautical Society, a “semi-fictitious organisation” through which he puts up art projects.

Satin Island is about U, an anthropologist who is hired by a corporation (The Company) to write a piece of ethnography titled “The Great Report” – a comprehensive study with the end goal of summing up our age. U becomes obsessed with oil spills and the death of a parachutist, and struggles with his increasingly distant lover Madison as well as the impossible project he’s been commissioned to create. In an interview with Vulture, McCarthy said, “It’s not really satire because all of this is just totally true. This is exactly what big consultancies do.”

The Illuminations, Andrew O’Hagan, UK
A Scottish novelist, O’Hagan is also a contributing editor to the London Review of Books and Granta. He has edited The Weekenders: Adventures in Calcutta, a collection of essays and stories on Kolkata by several writers, including Monica Ali, Colm Tobin, and Irvine Welsh. O’Hagan has authored five novels, two works of non-fiction, and famously ghostwritten autobiography of Julian Assange.

In The Illuminations, we meet the elderly Anne Quirk, a once-trailblazing, celebrated photographer whose contributions are now all but forgotten. We also meet Luke, Anne’s grandson, who is with the army in Afghanistan. While Quirk strains to remember her life, in spite of her fading memory, Luke returns from Afghanistan, struggling to forget the horrors of occupation and war. Together, they journey to Blackpool, where artificial lights called The Illuminations run for sixty-six days every year.

The Fishermen, Chigozie Obioma, Nigeria
Obioma was born in Nigeria, lived in Turkey, and now teaches literature and creative writing in the United States. He has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan. This is his debut novel.

The Fisherman is set in the 1990s, in the small Nigerian town of Akure, and told from nine-year-old Benjamin’s perspective. He is one of four brothers who together take advantage of the absence of their disciplinarian father to miss classes at school. Instead, the brothers go fishing for six weeks, until someone spots them and their mother is told. Then, a prophecy is made that the oldest boy will be killed by one of his brothers.

Lila, Marilynne Robinson, USA
Robinson’s debut novel, Housekeeping (1980) won a Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for best first novel. It wasn’t until 2004 that she published her second novel, Gilead, which is the first in a loose trilogy. It won the Pulitzer Prize.

Lila is the third book in this trilogy. Robinson revisits her central character, the elderly preacher John Ames, and tells the story of his new, young wife, Lila. Robinson’s narrative inhabits Lila’s thoughts and memories, and we find out about a rough childhood that hardened her, her questioning of faith and belief through her conversations with the mild Ames, and the way that these two very mismatched people find love and salvation of a kind.

Sleeping on Jupiter, Anuradha Roy, India
Award-winning author, Roy studied English Literature at Presidency College, Kolkata and then at Cambridge Univeristy. She co-founded the independent press Permanent Black. Her debut novel, An Atlas of Impossible Longing (2008), is written in three parts and concerns three generations of a Bengali family. It spans major events in Indian history, including India’s Independence and Partition. Her second novel, The Folded Earth (2011), is about Maya, who marries a Christian man against her family’s wishes, and then loses him to a mountaineering accident.

Sleeping on Jupiter’s protagonist is Nomita, only seven years old when she witnesses the brutal killing of her father, and the loss of her remaining family. She goes to the orphanage run by a world-renowned guru, from where she is adopted. The novel follows Nomita’s return as an adult to the small town, and her encounters with several other people: three older women who are travelling together, her tour guide, and her assistant.

The Year of the Runaways, Sunjeev Sahota, UK
A second-generation British Indian, Sahota studied mathematics at the Imperial College, and was working in marketing for a travel insurance company when he published his first novel in 2011, the successful Ours Are The Streets, an examination of violent political radicalisation as mental illness.

The Year of Runaways finds Sahota further investigating the British-Asian immigrant experience, told through the intertwined tales of three Indian men living with other migrant workers in Sheffield, and one British indian woman. The men, Tochi, Randeep and Avtar, from wildly varied backgrounds, have fled their home country for various reasons, and one of them, Randeep, is an illegal migrant who pretends to be the husband of Narindar, a devout British Sikh woman.

The Chimes, Anna Smaill, New Zealand
Smaill is a poet and novelist who studied English literature and creative writing. She lives in Melrose, a suburb of Wellington. She follows in the footsteps of Eleanor Catton, who was the youngest writer to be awarded the Booker, back in 2013.

The Chimes is Smaill’s debut novel. Set in a dystopic alternate medieval London, a totalitarian group called The Order controls the lives of the populace by denying them their memories, and by extension wiping history clean with the help of a vast musical instrument called the Carillon.

A Spool of Blue Thread, Anne Tyler, USA
Anne Tyler is a grande dame of American letters, and has written 20 critically acclaimed novels since 1964. The Maryland-based author once worked as a librarian and bibliographer. Tyler has been awarded the National Book Critics Circle award in 1985, and the Pulitzer Prize in 1986.

Her 20th novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, finds Tyler writing about the extended Whitshank family, wittily examining the ties that bind. Centered around the strong matriarch Abby and the old house that she lives in in Baltimore, and set over some seven decades, the novel examines the choices that people make and the familial love and acceptance that they crave.

A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara, USA
The travel writer and editor Hanya Yanagihara’s second novel, A Little Life, has become quite the sensation in America, prompting the Manhattan-based writer to be hailed as a major new voice in American fiction.

Written in an intense burst over 18 months after the publication of her debut, the hefty novel of over 700 pages tells the story of four men, college friends in New York who chart their careers as successful and famous actors, artists, lawyers and architects in an engaging bildungsroman.

The narrative then subverts this premise by entering the dark and secret life of one of the friends, Jude, a man of a traumatic and scarred past haunted by abuse and betrayal.