As for the masters of Asia, I was very annoyed that Ma Jian's Beijing Coma didn't win the Foreign Fiction Prize last year-it was one of the most substantial novels I've read for a long time and made Solzhenitsyn's condemnation of Stalinism look like a vicarage tea party. There were very few Chinese submissions this year, but Yu Hua's Brothers covers China's recent history, the transition from Maoist lunacy to cut-throat mercantilism, roughly the same period Ma Jian tackled. Yu Hua still lives in China (unlike the intermittently banned Ma Jian who's now with us in London) and perhaps because of this, his work lacks the pure brutality of Jian's chronicle. But he does serve up a picaresque romp à la Tom Jones.

There were many books for which I had great hopes. One of the things a novel can do very well is to fashion a window into another world, to provide travel without the inconvenience of travel. 

The Guatemalan Marco Antonio Flores's Comrades could have educated the reader about the civil war and turmoil in his country, but didn't. I blame James Joyce and the belated arrival of Modernism in Central America. Similarly, Shahriar Mandanipour's Censoring An Iranian Love Story could have provided a fleeting flavour of current life in Iran, but he was struck down by what might be post-modernism and is certainly a case of overcleverness. The Lebanese writer and former PLO-er Elias Khoury's novel Yalo works well in sections and does contain powerful vignettes from Lebanon's violent past, but Khoury too, succumbs to a desire to be too clever as we get multiple versions of Yalo's confession (note to writers-if you have a really strong story, just tell it).

And, finally, there were some pleasant discoveries. The two most exciting finds for me were the young Italian writer Pietro Grossi (whose short story collection Fists was a delight) and The Madman of Freedom Square (another short story collection) by an Iraqi refugee Hassan Blasim. Blasim's writing about the fate of Iraq and fleeing Iraqis radiates with the energy of stories that need to be told, rather than the competence of work that is often done for contractual fulfillment. I can't say I'm surprised that both are published by small, independent publishers: Pushkin (who have a highly admirable record on foreign fiction, even if they do translate a see-through French novel or two) and the feisty Manchester-based Comma Press.

I'm curious to hear what the other judges think. Taste.