Consider. In The Gift of Rain, Malaysian Tan Twan Eng revisits the Japanese invasion of Penang in the late 1930s. A friendship between a Japanese diplomat and a young Chinese-English settler extracts bitter conflicts of loyalties. In Mister Pip, New Zealand’s Lloyd Jones conveys the power of books (specifically, Great Expectations of course) in a story set during Papua New Guinea’s blockade of Bougainville island in the early 1990s.

In Consolation, France-based Canadian writer Michael Redhill tells of an academic controversy arising from a Toronto professor’s contention that a new stadium is being built upon a landfill that contains the remains of an Englishman’s treasure from another century. Chinese-Welsh Peter Ho Davies’s The Welsh Girl is set in the closing days of the second world war and follows the lives of, among others, a German prisoner of war in Wales and a Jewish out to interview Rudolf Hess. Edward Docx’s Self Help moves between St Petersburg and London in an Anglo-Russian family saga.

Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People looks into the devastation to lives caused in a town called Khaufpur due to a gas leak from an American owned chemical plant, called the Kampani by locals.

Pakistani Mohsin Hamid plays equally close to real events in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, written as a chilling monologue in a teashop in Lahore’s Anarkali. A former investment banker tells an American stranger — or so we think — how 9/11 took him away from the West. As night falls, it becomes increasingly unclear which of the two may know more about the other and whether it was in fact an innocent encounter. Or, was it the beginning of reconciliation or confrontation?

And, coincidentally, Kota-born, Cardiff-raised and London-based Nikita Lalwani’s Gifted has been published in India just this week. In an extremely uneven novel, Lalwani paints the darker side of the great immigrant dream. At the age of five, Rumi, short for Rumika Vasi, gives her parents — especially her father Mahesh, who teaches at university in Cardiff — obsessive purpose when her teacher hails her as a mathematics prodigy.

Just that classification sets up the very interior cultural conflict of this still newly immigrant family. Mahesh finds it patronising, seeing her possibilities as being more contingent upon nurture and application. Nonetheless, it puts him on course to gaining as swiftly and methodically as possible acclaim for her educational accomplishments. Rumi’s regimented life is a way to get her the benefits of modern education. It, however, also exiles her from the social and personal freedoms that come with modernity.

Lalwani’s skill lies in keeping premonitions of tragedy hovering through the narrative. But her ability to convey the complex interior conflict does not extend to depicting cultural differences as the family lives out long stretches in Cardiff on the promise of occasional visits to India. Instead the conflict comes through most powerfully in Mahesh’s bemusement over media reports when Rumi gains admission to Oxford University at the age of 15. They focus more on her strictly controlled life and spotlight his insular views on getting by in Britain. Yet, at the end when tragedy does finally come, for the first time there is a sense of hope.

Literary prizes and nominations are an imperfect way to take stock of new writing. But a year after the jury for the Booker — the Commonwealth’s most popular prize — almost officially counted established writers out of contention, the 2007 longlist could launch a new trend: books being present on literary and thematic reasons.

The Man Booker Prize longlist:

Darkmans by Nicola Barker

Self Help by Edward Docx

The Gift Of Rain by Tan Twan Eng

The Gathering by Anne Enright

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies

Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones

Gifted by Nikita Lalwani

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

What Was Lost by Catherine O’Flynn

Consolation by Michael Redhill

Animal’s People by Indra Sinha

Winnie & Wolf by A.N. Wilson

The shortlist will be announced on September 6 and the winner on October 16