Booker judges stick to the well-told story of pretenders and conspicuous absentees

The first Booker Prize shortlist of the new millennium arrived yesterday with a now-familiar recipe of established stars, younger pretenders, startling surprises - and the whiff of internecine warfare.

The first Booker Prize shortlist of the new millennium arrived yesterday with a now-familiar recipe of established stars, younger pretenders, startling surprises - and the whiff of internecine warfare.

Its most famous (and widely predicted) names are the Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, immediately installed as a hot favourite with The Blind Assassin, and Kazuo Ishiguro, winner in 1989 with The Remains of the Day, for When We Were Orphans.

They are joined by the young Welsh writer Trezza Azzopardi, with her novel of the Maltese underworld in Cardiff, The Hiding Place, and Matthew Kneale, son of the cult TV science-fiction writer Nigel Kneale, creator of Quatermass, for his historical novel of Victorian faith, doubt and colonial conquest, English Passengers.

The other pair of contenders featured on no pundit's radar screen are Irishmen who live in America, the Seattle-based Michael Collins, with The Keepers of Truth, and the New York doctor-turned-artist Brian O'Doherty, for The Deposition of Father McGreevy.

With Atwood, their presence means half the shortlisted authors for Britain and the Commonwealth's premier fiction prize live in North America. Yesterday central London's biggest bookshop, Waterstone's in Piccadilly, had only two of the six titles (Atwood and Azzopardi).

Simon Jenkins, chairman of this year's judges, praised the list for its "narrative energy, imaginative treatment and original voices". Fellow panellist Mariella Frostrup, the columnist and TV presenter, promised that readers who buy the titles "will have a very good time reading them". The winner of the £21,000 award will be announced at a dinner at Guildhall on 7 November.

Jenkins - a journalist, millennium commissioner and champion of the Dome - said he detected "a certain revival of the well-told story" among the candidates. But he also voiced disappointment at under-par performances by some leading authors. "Not all of them produced their best novels this year." Conspicuous absentees include Julian Barnes ( Love etc), Michael Ondaatje ( Anil's Ghost), Jeanette Winterson ( The.PowerBook), and Zadie Smith's hugely acclaimed debut novel of multi-cultural London, White Teeth.

True to Booker form, hints of dissent among the five judges swiftly emerged. Frostrup and Jenkins reportedly defended the middlebrow "good read" against the more demanding tastes of Caroline Gascoigne (literary editor of The Sunday Times) and Roy Foster, professor of Irish history at Oxford. The fifth judge is Rose Tremain, deemed by many critics unlucky not tobe shortlisted in 1999 for her latest novel, Music & Silence.

As with Formula One, the Booker Prize always inspires an unofficial "maker's championship" as rival publishers assess their showing. The big winner here is Gary Pulsifer and his tiny, three-year-old firm Arcadia Books, publisher of Brian O'Doherty. Yesterday, Pulsifer ordered a 10,000-copy reprint of The Deposition of Father McGreevy and hoped that the Booker limelight would take his company "another level up".

Already this year, Arcadia has won blanket coverage and wide praise for Easter, the controversial novel about the Church of England by the Independent reviewer Michael Arditti.

This year's clear loser must be Random House. The vast German-owned conglomerate whose celebrated literary imprints (Jonathan Cape, Chatto & Windus, Secker & Warburg) made no impression on the shortlist. Cape, the legendary publisher of Amis, Rushdie, Barnes, McEwan and Winterson, has now failed to reach the final cut for two years in succession.