Judges for the Man Booker prize for fiction sprang their customary surprise on Tuesday when they omitted Sir Salman Rushdie’s latest novel, The Enchantress of Florence, from their shortlist – just weeks after the author’s classic Midnight’s Children was voted Best of the Booker in an online poll.

This year’s shortlist for the £50,000 prize unusually includes two first-time novelists: Madras-born Aravind Adiga, 33, for The White Tiger, about the entrepreneurial successes of the son of a rickshaw puller; and Australian Steve Toltz, 36, for A Fraction of the Whole, a son’s memoir about life with his paranoid father.