Richard Powers’ Bewilderment, like his previous novel The Overstory, is concerned with ideas and information at least as much as what people do. Theo is an astrobiologist building models of possible life in other universes; Robin is his explosive neuro-diverse nine-year-old son, a brilliant misfit obsessed with the disappearing life on the planet he knows.

Both are consumed in different ways with grief for Robin’s mother Ally, who died in a car accident; the boy gives way to rages that his school insists must be controlled. Desperate to avoid stuffing his son with drugs, Theo turns to his own world of experimental science; Robin starts sessions of mental communion with a machine that reads his mood and pushes him to modify it. It’s high tech; it’s possible and it turns out to be very disturbing.

Powers has his haters, both for his clear ecological agenda and the fact that he couches it in precise, cerebral, rhythmically calibrated prose that does not invite easy identification with his characters. For those of us who rejoice in Powers for exactly those reasons, it is a small marvel, a chamber piece working with Overstory’s symphonic themes.

Bewilderment is not, however, the most exquisitely literary novel on the list. Unquestionably, that is A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam. It centres on Krishan, a young Tamil student who feels inexplicably drawn towards the brutalised country of his rebel forefathers, despite having grown up in India; when the opportunity comes to attend a funeral in Tamil heartland, he seizes it.

That’s it. Some critics have complained that nothing happens – which it doesn’t, apart from the culminating funeral – and that Arudpragasam’s sentences are very long, which they are. Intricately woven, grammatically so exact that you can follow the sub-clauses for pages without faltering, those endless sentences are the perfect formal expression of Krishan’s drifting, indecisive intelligence and his yearning for things he can’t name. A Passage North often made me think of Mrs Dalloway. Nothing much happens in that novel, either.

The only book on the list to come from Britain, although arguably its Somalian perspective is more essential to the story, is Nadifa Mohamed’s The Fortune Men. Working from newspaper reports of a Somali seaman accused of murdering a Cardiff shopkeeper, Mohamed conjures up a post-war world in which a man with dark skin was not believed or even heard; even his own barrister called Mahmood Mattan “a half-formed savage”. The irony is that Mattan does tell lies, even if they are not the ones the police want to pin on him. Mohamed’s great talent is to understand how and why he betrays himself – and to make us understand it, too.

The bookies have called it, however, for what is generally agreed to be a clear winner: The Promise, the third of South African writer Damon Galgut’s excellent novels to be shortlisted. Tracing the decline of the Swarts, a well-to-do Afrikaner family, through several decades and four deaths, Galgut skewers the details of vapid lives bolstered by petty privilege: the women baking, the men drinking, the children’s longing to be different, the virtual impossibility of being different.

The promise of the title was made by Pa – ineffectual, blustering, spent – to Ma on her deathbed that he would give their maid the house from which she has served them for most of her life. Amor, the youngest child, heard him. She knows.

But once Ma has died, he refuses to remember; when apartheid is overthrown and their money dribbles away, he can’t even think about it. Then he dies and it falls to Astrid, mean-spirited since adolescence, then to the prodigal Anton, awash in white guilt and permanently sozzled, to make amends.

The homage to Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury – about a disintegrating white family in America’s South, also told from four points of view – is obvious, but Galgut’s acerbic, angry voice is all his own.

Like a character in its own right, that authorial spirit flies like Puck between his characters, seeing into their minds and speaking their thoughts, in order to draw a girdle about the complicated, bitter history of South Africa. Of course he should win.