This is a marvellous feat of storytelling, told with the type of light touch that can only be achieved through hard work. Roy believes his job is to “sit his wife down”, meaning to earn enough that she needn’t go out to work. Real men don’t leave, Mama tells him, they stick around – but how can they, when the system is skewed towards locking them away? He expects his wife to stay loyal, a Penelope to his Odysseus, but she, too, has appetites – for success, for fulfilment, for love. “I did my best to be the real man had in mind,” reflects Roy. An American Marriage is as much an exploration of modern gender roles as it is an inquiry into social justice, particularly the male burden. Like its UK cousin, Diana Evans’s excellent Ordinary People, also on the shortlist, the novel probes the way cultural expectations influence and clash with personal aspirations for the black middle classes. Jones portrays the fallout first as a two-hander, with the narration shifting between husband and wife, and subsequently as a three-hander when another figure enters the picture, upsetting Celestial and Roy’s delicate balancing act. But his life runs violently off the rails when he is convicted of a rape he didn’t commit.

He is affable, slightly pompous, fond of rules and regulations – a man who knows his own mind. Roy Othaniel Hamilton is a young southern black man who is going places: after college, he landed himself a good job and a wonderful wife named Celestial Gloriana, no less.

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones