The Best of the Booker will honour the finest novel to have won the The Man Booker Prize for Fiction since it was first awarded on April 22, 1969, the organisers announced on Thursday.

In all, 41 novels will be eligible for the award, including Rushdie's Midnight Children, Roy's God of Small Things and Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss.

This is the second time that a celebratory award has been created by the Man Booker prize organisers. In 1993 – the 25th anniversary -- Rushdie won the Booker of Bookers for Midnight's Children.

The Best of the Booker will, for the first time, invite the public to help decide which novel deserves to take this prestigious one-off award. The public will choose from a shortlist of six novels to be selected by a panel of judges chaired by novelist and critic Victoria Glendinning.

The two other judges on the panel are writer and broadcaster Mariella Frostrup and John Mullan, Professor of English at University College London.

Their shortlist will be announced in May, and public voting will then begin here on the Man Booker Prize website.

Glendinning said on Thursday: "The Best of the Booker is a wonderful opportunity to read, or reread, some of the best literature in English of the past four decades. We are having a very good time revisiting the now-classic novels which won the Booker long ago, as well as the celebrated ones from recent years."

"All readers will enjoy this, and we look forward to hearing what the voters think -- and which one, from our shortlist, they will judge the Best of the Booker."