Now that summer is over and it's time to plunge into some more serious reading, check out the  Man Booker Prize's shortlist, which was announced yesterday. It skipped over previous winners John Berger and Salman Rushdie for several newish authors, including a pair of first-time novelists. Here are stories from The Guardian and the New York Times.  

The list: Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger; Sebastian Barry's The Secret Scripture; Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies; Linda Grant's The Clothes on Their Backs; Philip Hensher's The Northern Clemency; and Steve Toltz's A Fraction of the Whole.

Adiga and Toltz are first-time novelists, and Barry is the only person on the list to have been previously shortlisted (in 2005).