Memorable Debuts

• Recommend another "first"!

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I have an inordinate fondness for first novels. There’s something so exciting about discovering new work and a new writer. What sometimes happens, of course, is that their first novels were the best they ever wrote, or sometimes (as is the case for Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird), the only novel they wrote. So without reference to any other books by these authors, I present here some first novels (in alphabetical order by author) that I am delighted to have read:



Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum

Charlotte Bacon’s Lost Geography

Bonnie Burnard’s A Good House

John Derbyshire’s Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream

Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai

Harriet Doerr’s Stones for Ibarra

Tom Drury’s The End of Vandalism

Mark Dunn’s Ella Minnow Pea: A Progressively Lipogrammatic Epistolary Fable

Gloria Emerson’s Loving Graham Greene

Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides

Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair

Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated

Jonathan Franzen’s The Twenty-Seventh City

Elizabeth Gilbert’s Stern Men

John Griesemer’s No One Thinks of Greenland

Elizabeth Hay’s A Student of Weather

Elizabeth Inness-Brown’s Burning Marguerite

Joshilyn Jackson's gods in Alabama

Heidi Julavits’s The Mineral Palace

Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees

P. F. Kluge’s Biggest Elvis

Steve Kluger’s Last Days of Summer

Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist

Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker

David Long’s The Falling Boy

Nuala O’Faolain’s My Dream of You

Ann Packer’s The Dive from Clausen’s Pier

Ann Patchett’s The Patron Saint of Liars

Tom Perrotta’s The Wishbones

Bette Pesetsky’s Author from a Savage People

Steven Sherrill’s The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break

Zadie Smith’s White Teeth

Sarah Stonich’s These Granite Islands

Hans-Ulrich Treichel’s Lost

Kate Walbert’s The Gardens of Kyoto

Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist