On Oct 13, will the laurel go to veteran American writer Anne Tyler or to Britain's Tom McCarthy, who were both in the running for earlier Man Booker awards?

Will the prize be taken by the debut novel of Nigeria's Chigozie Obioma or go to other relative newcomers such as Hanya Yanagihara (United States), Sunjeev Sahota (United Kingdom) or Marlon James (Jamaica)?

Life reviews the six novels up for the coveted literary award.

CHIGOZIE OBIOMA

The debut novel of Nigeria-born Chigozie Obioma is up for one of the richest literary awards in the world. An assistant professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the 29-year-old completed a master of fine arts degree in creative writing at the University of Michigan and has had short fiction published in literary magazines such as the Virginia Quarterly Review and New Madrid.

Lovers, spouses, parents and children - their cares and tussles are the age-old subjects of literature. Less often depicted are the siblings, who have grown up in each other's shadows, traded blows in childhood scuffles and seen the best and worst of each other, uncoloured by parental expectations or a lover's desire.

The relationship of a band of brothers, all close in age and spirit and hovering on the verge of puberty, is mined with charged lyricism and psychological acuity by Chigozie Obioma in his debut novel The Fishermen.

Obioma's tale, set in the town of Akure in western Nigeria, begins as the boys' father is forced to move out of the family home to a distant town for work, taking with him the iron discipline and peaceable routines that have until then shaped his four older sons' lives.

As told in the searching voice of Benjamin, the youngest of this quartet, reflecting on these events as a grown man, the tale pivots on one parentally unsanctioned fishing trip by the boys.

On that trip, they run into a local madman known as much for being dissolute - after losing his mind, he had raped his mother and killed his brother - as for his powers of prophesy.

In fits and starts, the madman paints a picture of the oldest brother Ikenna suffering a gruesome death ("You shall open your mouth to speak on that day, but words will freeze in your mouth", "You will swim in a river of red, but never rise from it again").

Another brother who grasps the incoherent madman most clearly is pushed by Ikenna to reveal the identity of his killer - a fisherman.

The brooding Ikenna becomes possessed by the idea that one of his brothers will kill him, unleashing a chain of events that upends the lives of the whole family.

There is more than a suggestion here of Lord Of The Flies, William Golding's chilling 1954 classic about a group of young boys not knowing their own strength and getting drawn into paranoia and violence.

Any whiff of sensationalism in the plot is dispelled by Obioma's rich tapestry of characters, set against the claustrophobic intimacy of small-town life in a strife-torn country.

The result is a narrative that sings with heart-rending believability and speaks of a loss of innocence, not just of Benjamin and his brothers, but also of a troubled African nation during military rule in the 1990s.

Flashbacks lay out the bonds between the four brothers in a large family where both parents have their hands full with work and two much younger children.

These flashbacks also serve as quick sketches of larger socio- political forces.

One example is when the school headmaster, a Yoruba man and from a different ethnic group, mispronounces second brother Boja's multi-syllable Igbo full name, leading to much laughter from the students, some cursing from Boja and Ikenna leading the other three brothers out of school in protest against Boja's resulting punishment.

Loitering on the streets unexpectedly leads the boys to a light- hearted, life-changing encounter with popular Nigerian politician M.K.O. Abiola and his entourage.

In another blast from the past, after the military government annuls results of a presidential election apparently won by Abiola, the boys are caught up in widespread rioting and led to safety once more by Ikenna.

But in The Fishermen, memory is as much a salve to the wound as it is a siren song, shifting and unreliable, and Ikenna's selective memory contributes to the tragedy.

Obioma condenses such a vast canvas into a 301-page novel by having each chapter employ a particular symbol - an animal, myth or trope - which fleshes out an individual or state of affairs.

This gives Benjamin's ruminations the impact of a series of parables, extremely resonant in a novel where characters are guided as much by the Christian gospel as the Igbo notion of a personal spirit.

The pacing is unerring, the language vivid yet never overwrought; as the boys' mother tries to draw out the "metal-lidded secret" of their run-in with the madman, Benjamin imagines her waiting "anxiously, her feet suddenly set on the hill as if she'd seen a raptor advancing towards her fold, and she, the falconer, was ready for a confrontation".

With this first novel, Obioma adds his name to a distinguished roster of Nigerian writers that includes Chinua Achebe, Ben Okri and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

This is about as perfect as a debut could be, from an author not yet 30.

If you like this, read: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler (Serpent's Tail, 2013, $14.87, Books Kinokuniya) from last year's Booker Prize shortlist, another near-perfect novel about how a seemingly dysfunctional sibling relationship in the eyes of the world could be achingly normal from the inside.

Clarissa Oon

HANYA YANAGIHARA

American writer Hanya Yanagihara, 40, nearly won the PEN/ Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction last year with her first novel The People In The Trees, but lost to Shawn Vestal's Godforsaken Idaho.

She is now in the running for the Man Booker Prize with her second book, A Little Life. She is deputy editor at The New York Times' style periodical, T Magazine.