Booker Prize list is slap in the face for popular read

This year's Man Booker judges have failed to shortlist the book that has been finding the most readers and stirring up the greatest debate.

The Slap, by 44-year-old gay Greek-Australian Christos Tsiolkas, was on the longlist, and has been the second-best-selling new novel in this country over the last two months. It trails only behind Katie Price's latest ghostwritten effort.

Despite winning last year's Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the portrayal of middle-class suburban Australia has been denounced as misogynistic, casually racist, and being about "hideous people beating each other up". It is even alleged to be the sort of book Raoul Moat would have liked.

Tsiolkas has insisted the novel is not misogynistic but "about infantile men who are", and attacked the laziness and lack of courage of European and British writers.

The absence of The Slap from this shortlist, which promotes the more obviously literary and worthy titles from the longlist, is regrettable. This now looks like a safe, rather earnest Man Booker, which could decently be awarded to any of the remaining contenders without creating controversy — or great excitement.

If it goes to Peter Carey for the third time, it might be the right result, strictly speaking, but would also be a waste of the prize's power to bring a new readership to undervalued writers — seen to such good effect when Hilary Mantel won last year. Those here whom the prize could most valuably highlight would be the youngest, Emma Donoghue, and the oldest — the never-quite-sufficiently recognised Howard Jacobson.