On the morning of 12 October 1654, a gunpowder explosion in Delft left the Dutch city devastated. Among the victims was Carel Fabritius, 32, a painter who left behind his haunting masterpiece ‘The Goldfinch’, among a few other pieces of artwork.

Cumming’s book explores Fabritius’s life before the disaster and the connection between art and life, interweaving her own life and the death of her Scottish painter father into the story, along with appearances from the great artists of the Dutch Golden Age.

“I love this book because of the way she intertwines a subtle and tender love of her father with a deep understanding of Dutch art,” says judge Anne Sebba.

What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired a double?

Klein discovered that a woman who shared her first name, but had radically different, harmful views to her, was being mistaken for her. At first it was too ridiculous to take seriously. But then it took a dark turn, as she began grappling with a distorted sense of reality, becoming obsessed with reading threats and insults on social media from the followers of her doppelganger.

Klein decided to follow her double into a bizarre, uncanny mirror world of conspiracy theories and anti-vaxxers – lifting the lid on our own culture, from public shaming to deep fakes.

“Such a clever book, because [Klein] takes what, on the face of it, is a simple idea of having a double, someone who is frequently thought of as her, but then expands this to construct a dark comedy of a rather terrifying mirror image world,” writes Sebba.

Masud has always loved flatlands since her early memories of wide, flat fields spanning the horizons as she drove in the back seat of her father’s car in Lahore. As an adult in Britain, she has discovered many more – Orford Ness, the Cambridgeshire Fens and Morecambe Bay, to name a few.

However, these bare, haunted expanses remind her of the flat place within her, created by trauma. Suffering from complex PTSD, Masud embarks on a pilgrimage to Britain’s flatlands to seek solace and belonging, weaving in poetry, folklore and history, with recollections of her own early life.

“I love this for its originality and its intelligence. It is revelatory about both people and places,” says judge Kamila Shamsie.

In 1850s South Carolina, Rose, an enslaved woman, faced a crisis: the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag with a few items. Soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the sack in spare, haunting language.

How does one uncover the lives of people who, in their day, were considered property? Harvard historian Tiya Miles carefully traces these women’s faint presence in archival records and, where archives fall short, she turns to objects, art and the environment to write a singular history of the experience of slavery, and the uncertain freedom afterward.

“A vital re-telling and re-imagining of stories lost under enslavement. A bold and beautiful book, I loved it,” says judge Venetia La Manna.

What does it mean to be a human in a world of artificial intelligence? Through the voices of ordinary people, this book explores the impact of a set of powerful, flawed and often exploitative technologies on individuals, communities and our wider society.

How can AI strip away our collective and individual sense of agency? How will we be governed by algorithms in years to come? Why are we relinquishing our moral authority to machines? Murgia, the Financial Times’ first Artificial Intelligence Editor, not only sheds light on this chilling phenomenon, but also charts a path of resistance.

“This is a chilling and essential read about AI and the way it imports and exacerbates existing social inequalities,” says judge Professor Nicola Rollock.

Born in Montego Bay, Jamaica, where luxury hotels line pristine white sand beaches, Sinclair grew up with a volatile reggae musician father who was a strict believer in a militant sect of Rastafari. To protect the purity of the women in their family, he forbade almost everything: nowhere but home and school, no friends but this family and no future but this path.

Her mother did what she could to bring joy to her children with books and poetry. But as Safiya’s imagination reached beyond its restrictive borders, her burgeoning independence brought with it ever greater clashes with her father. Soon she realised that if she was to live at all, she had to find some way to leave home. In seeking to understand the past of her family, Sinclair takes readers inside a world that is little understood by those outside it, and offers an astonishing personal reckoning. An unforgettable story of a young woman’s determination to live life on her own terms.

“A lyrical, evocative, and beautifully written memoir about growing up Rastafari in rural Jamaica,” says Rollock.