In July, author Xiaolu Guo was expecting the delivery of a book that would not be published until September: Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, the highly anticipated follow-up to The Handmaid's Tale.

Guo was getting her copy so early because she is a judge for this year's Booker Prize, Britain's most prestigious literary award. There was just one problem, Guo says: she was late getting home from the airport when the courier turned up and refused to give the book to her brother and sister-in-law, who were visiting from China.