Which book deserves to win the Man Booker prize, to be announced tomorrow? The Wall Street Journal‘s Paul Levy looks at the list of contenders and deems some of the judge’s decisions “downright perverse;” like eliminating two novels that were on the longlist, the “riveting” The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas (Penguin 4/27/10) and the “thrillingly imaginative” The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell (Random House, 6/29/10).

Despite finding Tom McCarthy’s C (Knopf, 9/7/10) the “most daring work on the shortlist,” Levy comes down on the side of Peter Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America (Knopf, 4/20/10).

He considers one of the front runners, currently the best selling of the shortlist titles in the U.S., Emma Donoghue’s Room, (Little, Brown, 9/13/10) “unworthy” to even be on the list.

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