Pick a winner? The Booker Prize is trickier than ever this year

Their island lies off the coast of Maine. The symbolism of the story is obvious, although never laboured. The first residents planted the land out with apple trees; there is a foundation myth of a flood that the first family escaped by climbing the highest tree on the island. Their descendants show the ravages of inbreeding and extreme poverty, but are brought to life by Harding with such loving lyricism that their rotten fate leaves the reader shivering with anger.

You could say that this concern with trauma passed down extends to every book on the list, although I would read them a little differently: they seem less concerned with inescapable legacies than the problems of patriarchs. And not with systemic patriarchy – that old chestnut – but with individual fathers, failing men whose miseries are visited on their children.

In Chetna Maroo’s Western Lane, 11-year-old Gopi becomes the focus of her grieving father’s attention after his wife dies, leaving him floundering as he tries to bring up three girls. Pa comes from Pakistan and has the loneliness of the reluctant immigrant. Only Gopi is good at the game he loves: squash. He sets her a punishing training regime and, foggy with grief herself, she submits to it because she finds clarity only when she’s on the court. Slender but poignantly well observed, this is a strikingly empathetic picture of untethered parenting.

An all-American buoyancy of style propels Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You, which is probably the most readily readable novel on the list, but its substance is as grim as anything else here. Successive chapters swing between the points of view of various members of a Jamaican family who have escaped the rising political violence at home for Miami, crime city. Frying pan, fire: we can predict what’s coming, but Escoffery’s telling of it froths with energy.

Dad becomes a rum drunk, disintegrating further when his wife throws him out; cousin Cukie disappears from the back of his own father’s lobster boat; Trelawny, the kid who got to college and is clearly the author’s avatar, finds himself living in his van. His faltering moves to assimilate into what is supposedly a multi-racial society, game the system and get ahead make for a rollickingly fierce entertainment.

Unease, limited tolerance, generational trauma: those dots all join up once again in Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, a grand symphony of dynastic decline. The members of the Barnes family – the fatally deluded, incompetent car salesman, Dickie Barnes; his vulgar stunner of a wife, Imelda; a teenage daughter manipulated by her snake of a bestie; and a nerdy son lost in these emotional woods – are all nursing secret histories.

Murray squeezes out these stories in long, twisting chapters told from each character’s point of view. It is at once claustrophobically specific – Murray adopts a different patois depending on which character he is following – and socially sweeping, as he ushers Ireland’s recent history into each chapter’s mix. Everyone here is a casualty of a society that may not be the fascist state shown in Prophet Song but is certainly oppressive.

The Bee Sting is a big book, the kind that looks as if it should win any race it enters; not for nothing has Murray been compared to Jonathan Franzen. With the hot tips from the longlist – Sebastian Barry’s Old God’s Time and Tan Twan Eng’s The House of Doors – excised in favour of this notably rarefied shortlist, The Bee Sting and its convoluted but conventionally eventful narrative has the cautious blessing of the bookies.

Caution, however, is the crucial qualifier here because whereas last year’s winner – Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida – stood out as a work so wildly original, passionate and singular that it simply had to win, this year’s judges have ensured that every work on the list is singular.

Here be dark visions and challenging language. The candidates are all lesser-known names, including two debut novelists; there are no usual suspects. And it is a very literary list. It is a determined judging panel that would hold fast to Prophet Song, a book so painful and pessimistic I wondered who, for all its brilliance, would read it by choice. Or, for that matter, to Study for Obedience in which a supremely unreliable narrator testifies in language that seems artificially aged, then decanted onto the page for just a few connoisseurs.

I loved The Other Eden, with its windswept island, mad characters and startling metaphors, best of all – but that is not exactly a critical judgment. Actually, I think Study for Obedience could be the final pick, as the most formally daring book here. I say that, however, while exercising extreme caution. If this weren’t in print, I’d just be whispering it into my sleeve.