The surprise about this year’s Booker longlist? That for the first time in years, there are few surprises. This is a list dominated by big names, including one author who won the prize almost four decades ago. Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte, published next month, is a picaresque road trip through contemporary America inspired by Don Quixote. Jeanette Winterson also riffs on a classic: Frankissstein is a mashup of Romanticism and cutting-edge technology, exploring gender identity and AI. Deborah Levy gets her third nomination in a row for The Man Who Saw Everything, a wildly original treatment of totalitarianism and desire, while John Lanchester’s The Wall is a controlled dystopia about borders going up in a time of climate crisis.

But the biggest name, with the year’s biggest book, is Margaret Atwood: her Handmaid’s Tale sequel The Testaments is under lock and key until publication, set for 10 September. It starts 15 years after the original novel ends and is narrated by three female characters, but “spoiler discretion and a ferocious nondisclosure agreement prevent any description of who, how, why and even where,” say the judges. All they will let slip is that it’s “terrifying and exhilarating”.

The decision to admit any novel written in English, and hence US authors from 2014, alongside writers from the Commonwealth, Zimbabwe and Ireland, continues to anger Brits: the fact that there’s only one US writer on this year’s list (and she has joint British citizenship) feels like a riposte to the controversy. Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport, the monologue of a US homemaker at the end of her tether, is also notable for being a 1,000-page single-sentence epic published by a tiny indie press. Two Nigerian authors also make the cut: the previously shortlisted Chigozie Obioma, whose An Orchestra of Minorities is a contemporary twist on the Odyssey, and Oyinkan Braithwaite, whose Lagos crime caper My Sister, the Serial Killer, shortlisted earlier this year for the Women’s prize, is the only debut.

Elif Shafak’s books are under government attack in her native Turkey; 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World is a humane but hard-hitting novel capturing the final thoughts of a dying sex worker in Istanbul. Mexican-born Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive is only her first novel to be written in English; it is a timely, hugely impressive work that contrasts a New York family’s road trip south with the desperate journeys of the thousands of migrant children travelling north towards the US border. Irish author Kevin Barry is included for his linguistically exuberant and blackly comic Night Boat to Tangier, in which two ageing gangsters on a hopeless mission spar, squabble and look back on their misspent lives.

In a list dominated by established authors, Max Porter is a rising star: Lanny, the polyphonic tale of an unusual little boy in an English village, twines deep time and contemporary life with a lexical playfulness that sets the words literally dancing up and down the pages. Bernardine Evaristo, meanwhile, is an author coming into her own: Girl, Woman, Other, the intermingling stories of generations of black British women told in a gloriously rich and readable free verse, will surely be seen as a landmark in British fiction. Perhaps there are surprises yet to come, starting with the shortlist on 3 September.