Fingers crossed for Fingersmith

Sarah Waters is one of six shortlisted for the prize

By Jon Gower BBC Wales Arts & Media Correspondent

Many television sets in the town of Neyland will be tuned in tonight to coverage of the Man Booker prize.

Sarah Waters, who was brought up in the Pembrokeshire town, is on the shortlist for the prestigious literary prize, worth £50,000,with her third novel called Fingersmith.

Like her two previous novels, Tipping the Velvet - currently being shown on television in an adaptation by Andrew Davies - and Affinity, the book is set in Victorian London.

Sarah has managed to put the sex back into the Victorian novel

Russell Celyn Jones

It is a tale of mistaken identity, set in an underworld of thieves and villains and takes its name from a term used for a pickpocket.

One of the judges for this year's competition, Swansea-born novelist Russell Celyn Jones, thinks that Sarah has "managed to put the sex back into the Victorian novel."

He had the onerous task of ploughing through a hundred and thirty novels in order to help draw up the shortlist of six books.

Under chairman Professor Lisa Jardine, the judges were encouraged to look for books with a strong narrative drive.

Commonwealth

This year there is a strong Commonwealth flavour to the shortlist, with three novelists from Canada on the list.

Carol Shields' Unless mixes domestic detail with urban violence, while Spanish born Yann Martell's The Life of Pi tells of a man stranded on a boat with a Bengal tiger.

Her third novel Fingersmith was nominated

Toronto-based Rohinton Mistry's entry is a sprawling saga of life in his native Bombay, called Family Matters.

Australia is represented by Tim Winton's Dirt Music - an atmospheric story about a curious love triangle.

The senior writer on the list is based in England, although William Trevor's The Story of Lucy Gault is set very much in Ireland, and is the bookmakers' favourite.

The awards ceremony will be shown on BBC 2 Wales on Tuesday at 2200BST. In Pembrokeshire , as in much of the rest of Wales, fingers will be crossed for Fingersmith.