Six finalists shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize for fiction this year, organisers revealed in September.

Five of the six authors are women — the largest number in the prize’s 55-year history.

The finalists are: American Percival Everett, a 2022 Booker finalist for The Trees, who is again nominated for James, which reimagines Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of its main black character, the enslaved man Jim.

American Rachel Kushner, another former Booker finalist with her bestseller The Mars Room, is a contender again with spy story Creation Lake.

The other finalists vying for the 50,000-pound award are Britain’s Samantha Harvey, for Orbital; Canada’s Anne Michaels for Held; Australia’s Charlotte Wood for Stone Yard Devotional; and Yael van der Wouden — the first Dutch author to be shortlisted for the Booker — for her debut, The Safekeep.

Organisers said the stories transport readers from World War I battlefields to America’s Deep South in the 19th century to the International Space Station.

“Here is storytelling in which people confront the world in all its instability and complexity. The fault lines of our times are here,” said author Edmund de Waal, who chairs this year’s five-member judging panel. “They are books that made us want to keep on reading, to ring up friends and tell them about them.”

The winner will be announced on Nov 12 at a ceremony in London.

Founded in 1969, the Booker Prize celebrates the best fiction and is open to novels from any country published in the UK and Ireland.