The six novels shortlisted for this year’s International Booker Prize transport readers from Japan-ruled Taiwan in the 1930s to Nazi-controlled Europe during the second World War, from magic and domesticity in France in the 1990s to the turmoil and after-effects of the Iranian Revolution in 1979, from a brutal prison colony in a remote corner of Brazil to a strict patriarchal community in the Albanian Alps.
A diverse cast of richly realised characters is captured, including a suburban witch, a morally compromised film-maker, a bloodthirsty prison warden, a sworn virgin with a new identity, a young novelist and her interpreter who share a passion for food, and a multigenerational…