Most readers will have to wait until September to find out what happens in Margaret Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, but the Booker judges have deemed The Testaments worthy of a place on the 2019 longlist for the £50,000 literary prize.

This is the sixth time the Canadian novelist has been nominated for the Booker, and her second nomination since she won the UK’s most prestigious literary prize for The Blind Assassin in 2000.The Testaments is set 15 years after the end of her dystopian classic The Handmaid’s Tale. Out on 10 September, the novel’s contents remain a closely guarded secret – with this year’s judges, chaired by Hay festival director Peter Florence, only saying in their statement: “Spoiler discretion and a ferocious non-disclosure agreement prevent any description of who, how, why and even where. So this: it’s terrifying and exhilarating.”

Atwood will be competing with another former winner: Salman Rushdie, nominated this time for Quichotte. Inspired by Don Quixote and published in August, it sees an ageing travelling salesman falling in love with a television star and driving across America to win her hand. Judges called it a “picaresque tour de force of contemporary America, with all its alarms and craziness”.

On a longlist packed with big names – but notable for its exclusion of well-received novels by authors including Ian McEwan, Mark Haddon and Ali Smith – Rushdie is one of several British novelists nominated. Alongside him are Jeanette Winterson for Frankissstein, her reinterpretation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; John Lanchester for his dystopia The Wall; Bernadine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, a verse novel about the lives of black women; Max Porter’s Lanny, the story of a missing boy in a commuter town; and Deborah Levy’s The Man Who Saw Everything, which will be published next month and slips between time zones in what judges called “a playful and complex structure”.

After tensions in previous years over changes to the prize’s rules, widened at the end of 2013 to include US fiction, just one American novelist is featured: Lucy Ellmann. Born in Illinois, the Anglo-American Ellmann moved to England as a teenager, and was picked for Ducks, Newburyport, a 1,000-page monologue from an Ohio homemaker composed almost entirely of a single sentence.

The judges said that Ducks, Newburyport was “brilliantly conceived, and challenges the reader with its virtuosity and originality … A cacophony of humour, violence, and Joycean wordplay, it engages – furiously – with the detritus of domesticity as well as Trump’s America.” Ellmann is published by tiny independent press Galley Beggar, which first saw the potential in Eimear McBride’s award-winning bestseller A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing.

The 13-book list also includes Turkish novelist Elif Shafak for 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, which details the memories of an Istanbul sex worker whose corpse is left in a rubbish bin; Irish author Kevin Barry for Night Boat to Tangier, which judges called “a work of crime fiction not quite like any other”; and Nigerian author Chigozie Obioma, whose An Orchestra of Minorities is loosely based on the Odyssey.

And Mexican-Italian writer Valeria Luiselli is nominated for her first book written in English, Lost Children Archive, which sets a family road trip from New York alongside the journey of a group of Mexican children attempting to cross the border into the US.

Just one debut is nominated, from the youngest writer in the lineup: 31-year-old Nigerian-British author Oyinkan Braithwaite’s darkly comic thriller My Sister, the Serial Killer. Shortlisted for this year’s Women’s prize, the novel opens as Korede is called on to help her murderous little sister clear up yet another mess. Judges said it was “as skilful, sharp and engaging a debut as any first novelist can produce”, packed with prose “as pointed as a lethal weapon”.

All 13 books are “credible winners”, according to Florence. “They imagine our world, familiar from news-cycle disaster and grievance, with wild humour, deep insight and a keen humanity,” he said. “These writers offer joy and hope. They celebrate the rich complexity of English as a global language. They are exacting, enlightening and entertaining.”

The Booker longlist was chosen from 151 novels. Alongside Florence, the jurors were Liz Calder, the former publisher and editor, novelist Xiaolu Guo, writer Afua Hirsch and musician Joanna MacGregor. Literary director of the Booker prize foundation Gaby Wood revealed that they had also called in young adult novels, and “books that are sometimes dismissed as ‘commercial’” in their search for the year’s best fiction.

The longlist, she said, “shows the incredible range of what’s being written today”. “There are familiar names here writing at the height of their powers, there are young writers of exceptional imagination and daring, there is wit, incisive political thought, stillness and thrill. And there is a plurality that shows the making of literature in English to be a global endeavour.”

The prize is supported for the first time this year by Michael Moritz and Harriet Heyman’s charitable foundation Crankstart, rather than the Man Group. The shortlist will be announced on 3 September and the winner revealed at a ceremony in London on 14 October.