Booker Prize / Editor / 18 October 2011 /

The Booker Prize is announced tonight and, as the betting hots up, it's time for a final look at the markets...

Forget Champions League football, the biggest drama on Tuesday night will come at London's Guildhall as perhaps the most contentious Booker Prize ever is awarded.

The Betfair markets, which close at 18:00 before the prize is announced at about 22:00, have Julian Barnes as favourite at [2.3] but Carol Birch's odds are narrowing, currently in to [3.45]. God knows why, Jamrach's Menagerie a dreadful novel.

This year's Booker judges inspired consternation and column inches with a populist shortlist that excluded many of the year's hotly-tipped, heavy-weight novels in favour of what they called "readability." They said they wanted to celebrate books that would be enjoyed rather than admired. The contradicitions and implications of this unnecessary distinction have been deftly exposed elsewhere so let's just stick to bettting.

Oh, but there's much to admire and enjoy about the market leader - Barnes' haunting, elusive The Sense of an Ending - and the present correspondent would be pleased to see it win. I tipped Stephen Kelman's Pigeon English at [5.2] and he's still worth a wager, especially out at [8.2].

I'm struggling to see beyond Barnes - it would be ridiculous to give it to anything else, with the possible exception of Patrick DeWitt's The Sisters Brothers [9.6]. Esi Edugyan is nicely poised in the middle of the market at [5.2].

But if chair of the judges Stella Rimington, the former-spy turned thriller writer who has admitted to needing a ghostwriter, really wants to stick two fingers up to what she perceives as literary elitism, then AD Miller's thriller Snowdrops will prevail. At [11.5] it's the market outsider, but so was Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question this time last year. And look what happened there.

These judges might just spring another surprise. But really, it should be Barnes.

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