Forget cinnamon buns and bread rolls, every year’s best baker’s dozen is the Booker Prize longlist - 13 outstanding novels that will introduce you to absorbing new worlds.

With apologies to our triskaidekaphobic readers, to chime in numerically with the longlist here are 13 essential facts to know about this year’s books and authors.

1. Of the 13 books, three are debut novels: Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies by Maddie Mortimer, Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley and After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz.

2. Unusual narrators feature in two of the books: Glory is narrated by a vivid chorus of animal voices, while Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is partly told by the malevolent cancer travelling through the body of protagonist Lia.

3. There’s little sign of the ‘difficult second novel’ syndrome in this longlist, with two sophomore attempts making the cut: Hernan Diaz’s Trust and Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.

4. Independent publishers dominate the longlist: eight are from indies. Faber has two on the list (The Colony and Small Things Like These) - while really tiny publishers also make the cut, including Galley Beggar Press (After Sappho), Sort of Books (The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida), Saraband (Case Study) and Influx Press (The Trees).

5. Both youth and experience feature among the longlisted authors. If he goes on to win, Alan Garner will, at 88, become the oldest Booker winner (Margaret Atwood currently holds the record, at 79). If she goes on to win, Leila Mottley will become the youngest winner; she is currently just 20. (The record is held by Eleanor Catton, who was 28 when she won with The Luminaries in 2013.)

6. If it goes on to win the Booker Prize, Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan would become the shortest book to win, at a petite 116 pages. The most concise winner so far is Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald (1979), at a marginally less terse 132 pages.

7. Historical figures hover in and around several of this year’s longlist. Emmett Till’s shadow hangs over The Trees, while Booth explores the backstory of the man who assassinated Abraham Lincoln. After Sappho features a multitude of famous radical female voices - such as Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein and Radclyffe Hall. And psychiatrist R. D. Laing and actor Dirk Bogarde appear in cameo in Burnet’s Case Study.

8. Real-life stories serve as the inspiration for two of the books on the list. Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is partly inspired by the author’s mother, who died of cancer when Mortimer was a child, while Nightcrawling takes its inspiration from a real-life case of police officers in California sexually exploiting a young woman.

9. Four of the authors on this year’s longlist are part of the Booker family already: Bulawayo, Burnet and Fowler have previously been shortlisted, while Elizabeth Strout has been longlisted.