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is perhaps best known for The Beta Band who rose to popularity during the nineties with their folk electronica sound, hailed by critics and musicians alike.听

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Since The Beta Band split in 2004 Mason has continued to release new material under his own name and also as King Biscuit Time and Black Affair.听 In March of this year he released his second solo album, 'Monkeys Minds In The Devils Time.鈥櫶� Fire! is the second single from that album and is out on November 4th.

Noviolet Bulawayo, picks up her first Man Booker nomination with her debut novel, .听 The semi-autobiographical story follows the fortunes of Darling from her childhood in Paradise, a slum in Zimbabwe to her new life as an immigrant in the United States.听 The novel is Bulawayo鈥檚 response to the political situation in Zimbabwe under the leadership of President Robert Mugabe.

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鈥淭he book came out of Zimbabwe鈥檚 lost decade鈥�we need new ways of living, new ways of imagining ourselves, new ways of leadership.鈥�

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Bulawayo is the first Zimbabwean to be shortlisted for the prize. She is the author of 2 short stories, Snapshots (1999) and Hitting Budapest (2010).听 She is currently a Fellow at Stanford University.

At just 28 and with , Eleanor Catton has made the shortlist with an epic tale of secrets and lies, drugs and murder, love and loss set in 19th century gold rush era New Zealand.听听

A self-confessed fan of The Wire, The Sopranos and Breaking Bad, Catton has said the novel has been influenced by the long form box-set TV dramas. The multiple storylines and characters are intricately woven together so that you know everything is connected but possibly not quite as you imagine.

The only British writer on the shortlist, Jim Crace has emerged as the bookie鈥檚 favourite to pick up the Man Booker Prize this year with, what he鈥檚 said will be his final novel, .

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Set in an unnamed place in an unnamed time centuries ago, the inhabitants of a tiny English rural village find their way of life turned upside down as outsiders descend on them and the land on which they survive comes under threat. But Crace himself is keen to point out that the novel is about contemporary issues.

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鈥淭his is not a novel about the Tudor times, this is not a novel about enclosures. This is a novel about xenophobia and our strange ambivalent relationship towards property and the land.鈥�

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Crace worked as a journalist until 1987 but gave up due to excessive 鈥榩olitical interference鈥�. He published his first novel Continent, in 1986 which won the Whitbread First Novel of the Year Award. His 1997 novel Quarantine also made the Booker shortlist but will he be favourite with our panellists to swoop the prize this year?

is the second novel from Jhumpa Lahiri but her first to make the Man Booker shortlist.听 This multi-generational family saga focuses on the lives of brothers, Subhash and Udayan and shifts between the political uprisings of the Naxalite movement in Calcutta to the relative calm of academia in the wide open spaces of Rhode Island on the American East Coast.

Lahiri was raised in London, Boston and Rhode Island by Bengali parents and the immigrant experience of both her and her parents informs much of her work:

鈥淚 feel like in a sense every story I've written has been given to me by them. The stories are invented, the characters don't exist, but like so many writers I'm drawing from the world around me, and this particular bifurcation, this divided landscape, happens to be mine."

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Lahiri is the author of three other works of fiction: Interpreter of Maladies (1999), which won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; The Namesake (2003), adapted into a film by Mira Nair and Unaccustomed Earth (2008).

Filmmaker and novelist is the only Zen Buddhist Priest to make it onto the Man Booker shortlist with her metaphysical A Tale for The Time Being.听 Her first novel in over 10 years the book begins with the discovery of a diary which was washed up on a British Columbia shoreline, after (apparently) drifting across the Pacific following the 2011 tsunami.听听

Though initially set in present day Canada A Tale For The Time Being sweeps across several generations and continents to take in a Second World War Kamikaze pilot, a Tokyo teenager, a 104 year old Buddhist nun and a writer called Ruth.

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Ruth worked in commercial television and was an independent filmmaker before turning to writing fiction.听 She is the author of two other novels, My Year of Meats (1998) and All Over Creation (2002).听 She practices Zen Buddhism and was ordained as a Soto Zen Priest in June 2010.

Colm Toibin makes the shortlist for the third time (following The Blackwater Lightship in 1999 and The Master in 2004) with . At just over 100 pages it鈥檚 the shortest book in the running but re-imagines one of the greatest stories ever told 鈥� the crucifixion of Jesus from the perspective of his mother. Toibin is aware that his take is controversial.听

鈥淚n this version Mary is suspicious of his followers and dislikes the changes she has witnessed in her son. Her love for him is still strong as with any parent but I thought it would be interesting to see the change from a mother鈥檚 point of view.鈥�