2006 Man Booker Prize candidates

If you find the contenders for the 2006 Man Booker Prize unfamiliar, you are not alone. When the shortlist was announced, even Book Notes was alarmed that so few established writers had failed to make it to the final round.

Surprise exits by big-name writers have always been part of the Booker tradition, but this year the cull seemed particularly cruel. Peter Carey and Andrew O'Hagan fell by the wayside, as did Book Notes' favourite visionary David Mitchell, whose gentle and moving fourth novel, Black Swan Green, should by rights have secured him the £50,000 prize.

The remaining six are Kate Grenville, Edward St Aubyn, Hisham Matar, Kiran Desai, MJ Hyland and Sarah Waters, whose latest mediocre historical thriller, The Night Watch, is mystifyingly tipped to win.

The most interesting writer on the list is Hyland, an Australian of Irish parentage who once lived in Ballymun and whose novel, Carry Me Down, is set in Wexford and Dublin. Those of you partial to a flutter on such occasions should know that William Hill bookmakers are offering odds of 2:1 on Waters and 3:1 on St Aubyn. All will be revealed on 10 October.

This month sees the welcome return of William Boyd with what may prove to be his best novel to date. After an uncharacteristic silence of several years, the African-born writer has written an ecstatically received new novel, Restless, which sees him abandon his trademark lighthearted, satirical style for something altogether more intriguing. A complex tale of espionage, political conspiracy and deceit, Restless tells the story of Ruth Gilmartin, an English woman who learns that her mother was a Russian agent who worked for a French spymaster during the Second World War. As Gilmartin struggles to comprehend the complete deception, she finds herself involved in the power games of her own age, including a plot to overthrow the Shah of Iran, and must learn her mother's skills to survive.

With such a mind-spinning story, Restless looks certain to finally move Boyd out of the comic novelist category. As an admirer of the riotous A Good Man in Africa and the marvellous Any Human Heart, Book Notes looks forward to seeing Boyd's talents at work in a new genre. A year on from its publication, Book Notes is still savouring Bamboo, Boyd's volume of wide-ranging essays, reviews and occasional writings.

It has been a week of mixed fortunes for two major Irish writers, Roddy Doyle and Colm Tóibín. Doyle, not unknown for letting his characters express themselves in graphic terms, has been on the receiving end of some choice phrases. Paula Spencer, his new novel, was given one of the most devastating savagings in recent memory. Critic Tom Deveson accused Doyle of creating a novel of "unredeemed tedium", populated with "annoying" characters. He mocked his "constipated prose" which "expresses nothing". For Deveson, the book was like "being trapped in an English for Beginners class" and concluded that "It is difficult to care about anything so inconsequential."

Meanwhile, Colm Tóibín's new collection of short stories, Mothers and Sons, has been winning applause from all sides. Reviewer Patrick Ness singled out the "emotional intensity" and "relentless striving for psychological truth" in Tóibín's book and commended him for "making literature of a pleasingly grown-up kind".

The author was also charmingly eccentric in an interview with John Kelly at his offbeat-looking Dublin home for RTÉ's The View. The thoroughly unpretentious Tóibín explained how he gathered together the stories for the collection, which he began as early as the 1970s. Both books are out now.

Ronan Browne is currently on leave