If there's one thing keen readers of contemporary fiction hunger for above all else, it's originality - that wonderful moment when you read a novel and feel that you've never heard a voice quite like this before. Beryl Bainbridge had that quality and more besides - a talent for weaving bleakness and brutality into witty comedies peopled by a motley crew of eccentrics, charismatics and unfortunates.

There's one last treat in store for Beryl's fans - the publication, in June, of her final novel, The Girl in the Polka-Dot Dress. Alas, the rules of the Man Booker dictate that it must be awarded to a living writer, and so there will be no posthumous prize for the perennial Booker bridesmaid.

But while she may never have won the Booker prize, this week's announcement of the "Best of Beryl" award, in which the public will vote on their favourite of her five novels to have been shortlisted, provides a welcome opportunity to look back at her work.

But how to choose a winner? The novels on offer - The Dressmaker, The Bottle Factory Outing, An Awfully Big Adventure, Every Man for Himself and Master Georgie - span 25 years and a wide variety of settings and subject matter. Each of them offers considerable attractions, from the murderous drama of The Dressmaker to the ensemble comedy of a group of theatricals in An Awfully Big Adventure to the historical scope afforded by the Crimean War in Master Georgie. I've heard a lot of support for The Bottle Factory Outing while others mourn the absence of The Birthday Boys, Bainbridge's recreation of Scott's fatal polar expedition.

My own favourite is Every Man for Himself, in which Bainbridge imagines what might have happened on board the Titanic in the days leading up to its catastrophic end; her brilliance was to bring to life the heady combination of excitement, ambition, social climbing and skulduggery among its passengers, all of them blithely unaware of what awaited them.