As sponsorship arrangements for many of Britain’s book festivals were torpedoed by activists this year, a key source of income and promotion for literary novelists looks increasingly precarious. But at least the Booker Prize is still around to offer a lifeline to the writers struggling with serious fiction.

The “Booker’s dozen” of 13 novels on this year’s longlist have now been revealed. In recent years, the majority of long-listed books have come from independent publishers, giving commentators an annual opportunity to lament the bottom-line-focused conglomerates for leaving India to keep literary fiction alive.

But while seven of the novels on last year’s list were published by independents and eight the year before, there are two this year. But as it happens, this is an outstanding longlist, full of rich, original work. It is encouragingly clear that, despite reports of a decline in the number of people reading challenging fiction, the conglomerates have not yet given up.

This year the longlist includes its first Dutch author and its first Native American author, both, fortunately, published by mainstream British publishers. Yael van der Wouden’s historical novel The security explores the emotional treatment of the Jews who returned to the Netherlands after World War II; Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars explores two centuries of massacre and indignity visited upon America’s indigenous people. This is diversity in the best sense, introducing readers to cultures and histories underexplored in English literature.

The trend of long-listed books with an environmental theme continues. Playground, by the American master of eco-fiction Richard Powers, is his fourth novel in a row to receive a Booker nod, while Charlotte Wood‘s Stone Yard Devotional features a conservationist driven by desperation to retreat from the world.

And while the books on this list are seriously engaged with our times, there is little preaching, with expressions of doubt more common than asking simple answers. As the artist and writer Edmund de Waal, chairman of this year’s judges, has put it: “These are not books ‘about issues’: they are works of fiction that populate ideas by making us care deeply about people and their predicaments.” By and large, these books offer something more dubious and subtle than the self-aware Orwellian dystopia of last year’s winners, Paul Lynch’s Prophetic Song.

It’s a list largely devoid of household names, reflecting the good taste of the judges: this has been a particularly poor year for memorable works by the literary greats. Colm Toibin’s Long Island and Rachel Cusk’s Parade don’t rank with their best work. The judges have not been fooled into taking Andrew O’Hagan’s ridiculously long would-be masterpiece Caledonian Road at face value. Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo and Will Self’s Elaine, both due to be published in September, apparently didn’t tickle the judges’ fancy enough. (I’m sorry they missed it though What will survive of usHoward Jacobson’s best novel in years).

I think the book most likely to carry the award in November is James, Percival Everett’s take on Huckleberry Finn. A Booker nod for Everett’s The Trees two years ago helped transform a writer who has endured decades of gratuitous neglect into a literary great almost overnight – showing that the prize still has a lot of power and often uses it wisely . As parts of the literary ecosystem teeter on the brink of collapse, Booker is, thankfully, still thriving.

The Booker Dozen

Wild Houses, Colin Barrett

The debut novel from one of the best Irish short story writers of recent years is the story of a hapless teenager in small-town Ireland taken hostage over a drug debt. It’s a crime caper with plenty of violence but also, as Catherine Lough noted in her Telegraph review, “a palpable sense of human eccentricity and endurance”.

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Head shot, Rita Bullwinkel

The second longlist in a row for a book about girls’ sports, following Chetna Maroo’s squash novel Western Lane last year. This debut from the editor of the American literary magazine McSweeney’s Quarterly depicts the physical and mental struggles that occur during a two-day boxing tournament for teenage girls in Nevada.

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James, Percival Everett

Everett’s 24th novel retells the story of Jim, the runaway slave from Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, and finds depth in his character that eluded both Huck and Twain. “Much like Twain’s original work, Everett mixes the sweet with the bitter and horror with hilarity,” enthused Telegraph critic Jessa Crispin.

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Orbital, Samantha Harvey

The shortest book on this year’s long list covers the most, transporting us to the International Space Station, where six astronauts discover that distance gives them a new perspective on their lives. The Telegraph’s Lucy Scholes praised Harvey’s fifth novel for its “beautiful and soulful vision”.

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Creation Lake, Rachel Kushner

The fourth novel from the darling of American critics, to be published in September, features a freelance spy who infiltrates a commune of eco-activists in France. Anyone familiar with Kushner’s dense, ruminative fiction won’t expect a conventional take on the traditional espionage yarn.

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My friends, Hisham Matar

Harsh anger expressed with sensitivity and restraint is a hallmark of Matar’s work, from his memoirs The return, about his Libyan father’s abduction by Gadaffi’s forces, to this, his third novel. The story of three Libyan dissidents in exile in Britain, it has already won this year’s Orwell Prize for political fiction.

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This strange eventful story, Claire Messud

Messud’s seventh novel draws on her own family history to tell the story of a French-Algerian family’s wanderings through eight decades of war and peace. Our reviewer, Alex Peake-Tomkinson, found it “rarely joyous (but) consistently absorbing”, a “rich family saga” reminiscent of Balzac.

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Held, Anne Michaels

Best known for his Holocaust novel Fugitive Pieces, the Canadian author here stretches from the early 20th century to the near future, presenting a series of snapshots of the lives of various characters who are confused by war and tyranny but find solace in love. It is the most formally experimental book on the list.

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Walking Stars, Tommy Orange

Orange’s much-vaunted first novel, There There, culminated in a mass shooting at a Native American powwow; his second book explores the consequences, while also venturing back in time to explore the hardships of his characters’ ancestors.

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Disclosure, Sarah Perry

It is rare for authors of word-of-mouth bestsellers to be recognized by this award, but talented Perryauthor of the much loved The Essex Snake (2016), deserves this longlist for his fourth novel. Centered on a group of strict Baptists (as Perry himself once was) in Essex in the 1990s, it was described by our critic Madeleine Feeny as “a baroque, genre-bending novel of ideas, ghosts and hidden histories”.

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Playground, Richard Powers

Powers’ 14th novel centers on a Polynesian island that has been ravaged by mining and now faces the prospect of being surrounded by corporate-built autonomous floating cities. “Power’s unparalleled gifts for revealing the magic and mystery of the natural world are on full display,” say the judges; it comes out in September.

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The Safekeep, Yael van der Wouden

Set in the 1960s, this debut novel sees a young Dutch woman fall in love with her brother’s Jewish girlfriend while realizing how ineffectively her country has come to terms with the Holocaust. Our reviewer Gabrielle Schwarz found it “compellingly readable”, although the main character’s “political awakening” was less compelling than “her sexual one”.

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Stone Yard Devotional, Charlotte Wood

This is the first Australian novel to be longlisted in just under a decade: the start of a fight against American dominance since they became eligible for the prize in 2014? It’s a far from combative book: the quiet story of a woman living among eccentric nuns at a Catholic retreat in the wilderness. The Telegraph’s Orlando Bird praised its “cool and carefully balanced … sentences” and “sly humour”.

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