From The Guardian:
We hope you will find our suggestions intriguing, and that you will investigate the novelists on our list and let us know what you think of their work. We have selected, in no particular order, Chris Cleave and Mohsin Hamid for their superior thrillers; the Irish comic novelist Paul Murray; Zadie Smith, long a favourite of these lists, for her fearlessly inventive novels, Benjamin Markovits and Adam Foulds, for their ambitious lives of 19th-century poets; David Szalay, for his inventive take on Soviet history; the incomparably talented science-fiction writer China Miéville; Adam Thirlwell, for his brainy Jewish fictions, Rana Dasgupta, for his idiosyncratic fictional history of Bulgaria; Scarlett Thomas’s zany novels of ideas, Joanna Kavenna, for her nuanced treatment of childbirth, Dan Rhodes and Patrick Neate’s comedies, Kamila Shamsie, for her multi-generational Asian sagas, Sarah Hall’s assured meditations on love – and Evie Wyld, Steven Hall, Ross Raisin and Anjali Joseph, for their captivating first novels.
Now, may the debate begin.
The List
1 Chris Cleave (b 1973) His first novel, Incendiary, was about a terrorist attack on London and was published on July 7, 2005. The Other Hand (2008), a cross-national thriller set in England and Nigeria, became a word-of-mouth hit.
2 Rana Dasgupta (b 1971) Born in Canterbury, but now lives in Delhi. His first collection of stories was set in a Tokyo airport; his first novel, Solo (2009), was about a 99-year-old Bulgarian chemist.
3 Adam Foulds (b 1974) After writing his verse novel The Broken Word about the Mau Mau rebellion, he wrote his Man Booker-shortlisted study of John Clare, The Quickening Maze (2009).
4 Sarah Hall (b 1974) The author of four novels, the first two of which were set in the early 20th century in her native Cumbria. Her most acclaimed work is The Carhullan Army (2007), about a band of women rebels surviving in a Britain hit by environmental disaster.
5 Steven Hall (b 1975) His debut novel, The Raw Shark Texts (2007) – about a man who loses his memory and tries to create a new identity for himself – unusually lived up to his publisher’s hype.
6 Mohsin Hamid (b 1971) The Reluctant Fundamentalist – a literary thriller about a Pakistani man who may, or may not, be a terrorist – came within a whisker of winning the Man Booker in 2007.
More here.