The Man Booker Prize is the UK equivalent of America's Pulitzer Prize for books - these are all the finalists from the past 5 years

February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it's in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln's beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. "My poor boy, he was too good for this earth," the president says at the time. "God has called him home." Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returns, alone, to the crypt several times to hold his boy's body.

From that seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins an unforgettable story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its realistic, historical framework into a supernatural realm both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance. Within this transitional state — called, in the Tibetan tradition, the bardo — a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie's soul.

• "4 3 2 1" by Paul Auster
• "History of Wolves" by Emily Fridlund
• "Exit West" by Mohsin Hamid
• "Elmet" by Fiona Mozley
• "Autumn" by Ali Smith

A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's "The Sellout" showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the Holy Grail of racial equality―the black Chinese restaurant.

• "Hot Milk" by Deborah Levy
• "His Bloody Project" by Graeme Macrae Burnet
• "Eileen" by Ottessa Moshfegh
• "All That Man Is" by David Szalay
• "Do Not Say We Have Nothing" by Madeleine Thien

On December 3, 1976, just before the Jamaican general election and two days before Bob Marley was to play the Smile Jamaica Concert to ease political tensions in Kingston, seven gunmen stormed the singer's house, machine guns blazing. The attack wounded Marley, his wife, and his manager, and injured several others. Little was officially released about the gunmen, but much has been whispered, gossiped and sung about in the streets of West Kingston. Rumors abound regarding the assassins' fates, and there are suspicions that the attack was politically motivated.

"A Brief History of Seven Killings" delves deep into that dangerous and unstable time in Jamaica's history and beyond. James deftly chronicles the lives of a host of unforgettable characters – gunmen, drug dealers, one-night stands, CIA agents, even ghosts – over the course of thirty years as they roam the streets of 1970s Kingston, dominate the crack houses of 1980s New York, and ultimately reemerge into the radically altered Jamaica of the 1990s. Along the way, they learn that evil does indeed cast long shadows, that justice and retribution are inextricably linked, and that no one can truly escape their fate.

• "Satin Island" by Tom McCarthy
• "The Fishermen" by Chigozie Obioma
• "The Year of the Runaways" by Sunjeev Sahota
• "A Spool of Blue Thread" by Anne Tyler
• "A Little Life" by Hanya Yanagihara

August, 1943: Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his affair with his uncle's young wife two years earlier. His life in a brutal Japanese POW camp on the Thai-Burma Death Railway is a daily struggle to save the men under his command. Until he receives a letter that will change him forever.

It's a savagely beautiful novel about the many forms of good and evil, of truth and transcendence, as one man comes of age and prospers only to discover all that he has lost.

• "To Rise Again at a Decent Hour" by Joshua Ferris
• "We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves" by Karen Joy Fowler
• "J" by Howard Jacobson
• "The Lives of Others" by Neel Mukherjee
• "How to Be Both" by Ali Smith