FLC Staff Picks Blog

Taylor's Picks: Favorite Debut Novels

Exploring debut novels, or the first novel by an author, is something of a hobby of mine, so much so that I run a book club that exclusively reads debut novels (an amazing book club, at that). I find myself seeking out new authors when I read book reviews, or I'll find a book I really love and insist on reading the author's first immediately after. There are a lot of debut novels that have been popular in recent years. Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite, and There There by Tommy Orange stand out as three that have really captivated readers in recent years.

The titles I've selected below are some of my favorites, but by no means is this list exhaustive. There are so many more that I wish I could have included and there are quite a few that find themselves on the Browsing shelves. Do you have a favorite debut that you want to share—let us know in the comments!

note: Follow the title links to get a full description or to the "place a hold". We'll pull it for you!

A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

ISBN: 9781476738024

Publication Date: 2015

Meet Ove. He's a curmudgeon—the kind of man who points at people he dislikes as if they were burglars caught outside his bedroom window. He has staunch principles, strict routines, and a short fuse. People call him "the bitter neighbor from hell." But must Ove be bitter just because he doesn't walk around with a smile plastered to his face all the time? Behind the cranky exterior, there is a story and a sadness. So when one November morning a chatty young couple with two chatty young daughters move in next door and accidentally flatten Ove's mailbox, it is the lead-in to a comical and heartwarming tale of unkempt cats, unexpected friendship, and the ancient art of backing up a U-Haul.

Neuromancer by William Gibson

ISBN: 9780441007462

Publication Date: 2000

Winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards, Neuromancer is a science fiction masterpiece—a classic that ranks as one of the twentieth century's most potent visions of the future. Case was the sharpest data-thief in the matrix—until he crossed the wrong people and they crippled his nervous system, banishing him from cyberspace. Now a mysterious new employer has recruited him for a last-chance run at an unthinkably powerful artificial intelligence.  

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

ISBN: 9781573222457

Publication Date: 2003

The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father's servant, caught in the tragic sweep of history, The Kite Runner transports readers to Afghanistan at a tense and crucial moment of change and destruction. A powerful story of friendship, it is also about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption; and an exploration of the power of fathers over sons—their love, their sacrifices, their lies.

Carrie by Stephen King
ISBN: 9780345806819
Publication Date: 1974
Stephen King's legendary debut, about a teenage outcast and the revenge she enacts on her classmates. Carrie White may be picked on by her classmates, but she has a gift. She can move things with her mind. Doors lock. Candles fall. This is her power and her problem. Then, an act of kindness, as spontaneous as the vicious taunts of her classmates, offers Carrie a chance to be a normal...until an unexpected cruelty turns her gift into a weapon of horror and destruction that no one will ever forget.

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

ISBN: 9780618485222

Publication Date: 2004

Meet the Ganguli family, new arrivals from Calcutta, trying their best to become Americans even as they pine for home. The name they bestow on their firstborn, Gogol, betrays all the conflicts of honoring tradition in a new world--conflicts that will haunt Gogol on his own winding path through divided loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

ISBN: 9780060935467

Publication Date: 1960

A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable tale of coming-of-age in a South poisoned by virulent prejudice, it views a world of great beauty and savage inequities through the eyes of a young girl, as her father—a crusading local lawyer—risks everything to defend a black man unjustly accused of a terrible crime.

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

ISBN: 9780307278449

Publication Date: 1970

Pecola Breedlove—an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others—prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment.

There There by Tommy Orange

ISBN: 9780525520375

Publication Date: 2018

As we learn the reasons that each person is attending the Big Oakland Powwow—some generous, some fearful, some joyful, some violent—momentum builds toward a shocking yet inevitable conclusion that changes everything. There will be glorious communion, and a spectacle of sacred tradition and pageantry. And there will be sacrifice, and heroism, and loss.

 

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

ISBN: 9780393327342

Publication Date: 1996

Fight Club's estranged narrator leaves his lackluster job when he comes under the thrall of Tyler Durden, an enigmatic young man who holds secret boxing matches in the basement of bars. There two men fight "as long as they have to."

 

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath; Diane W. Middlebrook (Introduction by)

ISBN: 9780375404634

Publication Date: 1963

The brilliant and disturbing story of Esther Greenwood's journey from the glamorous world of magazine publishing in New York to the isolating world of the asylum has become one of the most famous books of the late twentieth century, and still has all its power to shock and move us.
 

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

ISBN: 9781400031702

Publication Date: 1992

Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality their lives are changed profoundly and forever, and they discover how hard it can be to truly live and how easy it is to kill.

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole; Walker Percy (Foreword by); Andrei Codrescu (Introduction by)

ISBN: 9780807126066

Publication Date: 1980

The place is the French Quarter, the characters, denizens of New Orleans's lower depths. Meet Ignatius J. Reilly, a 30-year-old medievalist who lives at home with his mother in New Orleans, and pens his magnum opus on Big Chief writing pads he keeps hidden under his bed. Considered by many a comic masterpiece that memorably evokes the city of New Orleans and whose robust protagonist is a modern-day Falstaff, Don Quixote, or Gargantua.

 note: unless otherwise stated, descriptions were edited from publisher information.