2024 and reading too many debut novels
In 2024, I tried to read a debut book every week. After all, I had a debut novel of my own coming out (as you’ll no doubt be aware if you’re reading this; I pretty much haven’t shut up about it since 2023). So reading a bunch of debuts seemed like a fun thing to do.
Today’s newsletter is about that: how did it go? What was it like as a process? What thoughts did I have about debut novels? It’s very long so I’ll let you know up-front there’s nothing at the end about cats or anchovy extract or exhibitions I went to or anything like that; if you’re not interested in five thousand words about debut novels then there’s nothing for you here. Why not read someone’s charming short newsletter about doll houses instead? I don’t remember where I got the link for this from but I just found it in an open tab and it’s pretty neat!
Right, on to THE DEBUTS.
A sidenote on the term “debut”. For some reason, the publishing industry calls people’s first novels their “debut novels”, and it does this with so much determination that the word “debut” no longer looks strange to me, even though I’m pretty sure I’ve never used it in any other context. Debut novels! Why not! Absolutely! Debut, debut, it’s an adjective; it’s a verb, let’s debut; it’s a noun, it’s your debut, you’re a debut. Sure!
I didn’t quite make my target of reading one debut a week; I ended up reading 45 or 46 (which was about half my reading for the year). I do think that’s pretty decent going! And it was definitely a different sort of reading experience to a normal year. Less whim-led, less time to get into a writer or a subject and really delve down, a little more deliberate, a little more stressful.
DEFINING “DEBUT”
I was pretty broad about what counted as a debut: I included books by writers who’d previously self published, but this was their first traditionally published book; by writers who’d written YA, but this was their first adult novel; by writers who had written non-fiction, but this was their first published fiction. That basically reflects how the word “debut” is used to market books, and usually it felt fair enough. (I was mostly strict about 2024 publication dates, but a couple of these were out earlier but turned up on debut lists because of a 2024 US or UK release.)
HERE ARE THE DEBUTS I READ
(This is the list! Sort-of. There are three or four books here that I haven’t read yet, but it seemed a shame to leave them out of the pictures. Plus it’s missing Beth Kander’s golem-based not-quite-rom-com I Made It Out of Clay, which I enjoyed very much but I don’t have a paper copy because it’s not out in the UK yet, and Megan Lally’s wonderful YA thriller That’s Not My Name, which I seem to have lost.)
When I started writing this post I pulled all of these debuts into a pile, and looked at them, and thought “hmm, I don’t know that I’ve had any useful realisations about the Nature of Debut Novels from piling these together”, and then I thought “wow there sure are a lot of pink spines here though”, and I looked a bit longer and thought “a lot of pink spines”. So I arranged them into a book graph to see exactly how many, and the answer is: more than any two other colours put together?
Obviously I wasn’t reading a totally random subset of every 2024 debut that exists. This is a selection of books that reflects my taste and my research and what shops I happened to go to and who I happened to talk to. But still, I wasn’t expecting so much pink! I definitely wasn’t expecting so little blue.
GENRES
I couldn’t draw any conclusions from all the pink, though, so I tried arranging them by genre instead. That immediately got a bit complicated; for example, I didn’t want to go through a pile of basically realist novels set in the modern day and decide whether each one was literary fiction or general fiction. So I ended up with this:
Sorting by genre really cements that I didn’t read a representative sample of all debuts: thrillers and romance are radically underrepresented, for example, and non-fiction is barely there. I assume everyone would divide these up slightly differently but I’ve gone with:
1. Experimental: books where if I told someone about it in the pub I would try to sell them on an unusual way it was written or structured at least as much as I’d try to sell them on what it’s about.
2. SFF: for this one I was very broad and counted anything with fantasy or science fiction elements: dystopias, parallel universes, magic realism, full-on sword adventures etc.
3. Romance: for this one I was very narrow and only counted proper “this is a romance novel, you know pretty quick who’s going to get together and you know it’s going to happen by the end and now you get to find out how” romance. I was surprised that there were only four, but I guess this is what happens when you draw your reading from general “here are some debut novels” lists and don’t think to seek out romance lists specifically.
4. Contemporary: anything set in approximately the present day, which I decided means “2004 onwards”. Tell you what though, basically every contemporary realist debut novel from 2024 was set in 2019. Presumably this is because everyone involved started writing in 2020 when they weren’t allowed to leave the house and didn’t have anything better to do. And they all naturally set their books in, you know, just The Normal Days Of Things Being Normal, A State Which Was Bound To Resume Soon, Right, Don’t Think About It Too Hard. And then by the time they were all doing final edits in 2023 they had to deal with the fact that normal days had not quite returned, and went “uhhhh look this happened in 2019, don’t ask questions”. (I say this as someone who did exactly that, although I went for the very slightly less widespread “uhhhhh this happened in 2024 and look the lockdowns and all that happened but it’s not plot-relevant, don’t ask questions” solution instead.)
5. Thriller: y’know, thrillers and realist horror, stuff with murderers. This is obviously a huge huge genre but I am a giant wuss who gets scared very easily so it was not surprising to me that I only read a few of these.
6. Memoir. Well, this section is literally just Zito Madu’s The Minotaur at Calle Lanza, isn’t it. It’s a very good book though. (And elsewhere in non-fiction I now realise I left Karen Tang’s great It’s Not Hysteria, on gynaecological health, out of the photos, but I’m not gonna redo the piles and take them all again.)
7. Historical: I counted anything set more than twenty years ago as “historical”; basically anything where I assumed the writer at some point had to Do History Research, whether that was sitting down in a library for a decade or hunting out old photos of themselves as a kid. I’ve put these in approximate historical order, ranging from 412BCE Syracuse to 2001 Cumbria. Probably Elle Machray’s great Remember, Remember should be over in SFF as it’s alternate history but see above re: not gonna restack all the piles.
SOME OTHER STATS
Oh wow, I don’t know everyone’s genders but I’m pretty sure there are NOT a lot of books by men here. A few! And a few by nonbinary people! But very very very much mostly women!
This is, sure, partly a reflection of publishing (certainly more women than men publish novels — I guess these days when men want to say a thing they’re more likely to start a podcast or make a videogame? Which is not a critique! I too have made videogames!).
But the imbalance in publishing is nowhere near as dramatic as the imbalance in my reading, so it’s also absolutely a reflection of my habits. I’ve looked at my book selection habits before and in any given year my choice has always been women-heavy but it’s never been this unbalanced — maybe reading a bunch of older books hides the fact that I don’t read many new books by men? Diversify Your Reading, Holly, I Guess! Men Have Stories Too! etc.
AND WHERE ARE THE WRITERS FROM, HEY
Here’s another embarrassing stat: I don’t know where all these writers are based but I think it’s very close to half in the US, half in the UK. Not everyone is from there — for example, there are one or two Australians who (like me! I can’t complain!) moved away. There’s definitely one writer based in New Zealand, a few in Canada, I think one in the Netherlands, one in Germany, one in France. And that’s… kind-of it? I think even the Irish writers on the list live in the UK.
This is weird, honestly.
It makes sense that the books on the list are all written in English — it takes a while for books to get translated, so most 2024 debuts in other languages won’t be out in English yet, and translations of older books seem less likely to be marketed as debuts so I was less likely to come across them. But there are plenty of people writing in English who don’t live in the US or the UK! Quite apart from anything else, how about reading a single debut by an Australian writer living in Australia?
And it’s not like I can just blame the publishing industry! I could have had a much less embarrassing lineup if I’d thought about this more consciously. I have a big list of all the debuts I was keen to read last year, and if I skim through the forty or fifty I didn’t get to I can see at least a few by writers who live outside the UK/US/Canada concentration: I think Julie Min (Shanghailanders), R.S.A. Garcia (The Nightward), Paula Gleeson (Original Twin), Keshe Chow (The Girl with No Reflection), Hildur Knútsdóttir (The Night Guest), Fiona McPhillips (When We Were Silent), Swati Hegde (Match Me If You Can), probably more.
And I think about how much I loved Madeleine Gray’s coming-of-age affair comedy Green Dot, and part of that is because it was a delight but part of it was also because it felt nice to be, I dunno, hanging out with the voice of another Australian. So I’m pretty sure I would get something from reading more books that aren’t all written in two or three countries!
Oh well, something to think about for next year.
SPEAKING OF THINGS TO THINK ABOUT: PUBLISHERS
So. I chose the books I read by browsing shops and asking booksellers for recommendations, by looking at lists online, by subscribing to debut-focused newsletters, by talking to other readers. I spent a bunch of time looking for books that weren’t published by one of the four or five huge companies that publish the vast majority of the books you’ll see in bookshops. (My own UK, US and Canadian publishers are all part of Penguin Random House, the biggest of them all — early on in the publishing process I’d have conversations with people who would say “pier 8”, “pier 8” and I had no idea what that meant, I’d nod my way through sentences wondering if Pier 8 was, I dunno, the place that paper shipments get delivered to or something? Turns out they were saying “PRH” all along).
Anyway, I tried quite hard to find books that weren’t from these big presses, because I’d read essays about how it’s bad for books as a whole for attention to be so concentrated on work put out by a limited number of big companies, and I’d thought: yeah that sounds pretty convincing! And this is an industry I’m part of now! I should try to be a responsible reader! I googled “small press debuts” and looked up lists of interesting publishing houses and browsed through their catalogues or signed up for their newsletters, I looked for unfamiliar little logos on spines in bookshops. And this is what the breakdown by publisher looked like:
(Some of these books came out with different parent companies in the UK and in the US — I’ve just divided them into piles based on whatever the front of each book said in the copy I own. Which was sometimes straightfoward and sometimes a pain to figure out, like a book would say “Tinybooks Minipress” and I’d have to google to see “Tinybooks Minipress is an imprint of Bookcorp & Biggo”. So, apologies to anyone I’ve put in the wrong pile!)
About 40% from PRH. Another 20% from Hachette, just under that from HarperCollins. One book each from Macmillan, which I think is the smallest of the big companies, and Simon & Schuster, which I think is huge in the US but not so much in the UK.
Almost 30% from “other”, which is honestly more than I was expecting (though a few of these are from, eg, Amazon or Disney, so not exactly all small press).
And tell you what, a lot of the books in the “other” row were great. Not, I think, particularly weirder than the big press books in the way I was slightly expecting? But so good, many of them among my absolute favourites of the year. I guess this makes sense: if small press books on average have a harder time getting noticed, without the heft of a huge company behind them, then by the time someone tells you about one of them or you see it on a list or a bookseller says hey, maybe try this, then they’ve probably had to be pretty great. So I guess it was worth my sitting around and googling “2025 small press releases” or whatever even when it felt weird and awkward to do, like an admission that if I didn’t my reading would be directed entirely by the whims of capital.
OKAY, THAT’S ALL THE PHOTOS; ONTO SOME THINGS THAT I THINK ABOUT READING DEBUTS, NOW THAT 2024 IS OVER
(Actually there’s one more photo of the books right at the end, along with some recommendations, but let’s get through the general thoughts first.)
1. YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT TO EXPECT WITH A DEBUT
It was exciting and also a little bit tiring to read so many books where I had so few expectations about what I was in for. I’d obviously know a bit about the plot or genre, and often I’d have read the free sample of the ebook before I shelled out on the paper copy, to make sure I thought I’d enjoy it. But I hadn’t read other books by the same writer, I hadn’t seen the books mentioned in passing for years, I was just turning up and going well what’s this, then.
I found a real joy in reading something without many preconceptions, and realising I loved it — and sometimes, if I read something very soon after it came out, I really enjoyed the sense of getting in early. Actually I lucked out here: I read Ferdia Lennon’s Glorious Exploits when it came out in January and I thought it was incredible, I thought this is a weird hard idea executed SO well, I thought I don’t know how you decide to write this book and I REALLY don’t know how you actually DO write it, I thought this is going to be on every prize shortlist and every best-books wrapup. And then it was! It’s not that I picked the book up because I have an incredible nose for an under-the-radar future hit or anything — I’m pretty sure a bookseller I’d met the previous year had told me about it, and when it came out it was already piled up on its own little table at my local Waterstones. But I still felt a kind-of weird sideways pride at every prize it won, the feeling of having read something early and predicted great things for it.
2. BUT WERE THE BOOKS GOOD AND HOW DID THE BOOKS DOOOOOOO
Because I am now friends with or in chat groups with a whole lot of 2024 debuts, I know that most people with a debut out get obsessed with the question of how will it do. Like: unhealthily, needlessly, fretfully, damagingly obsessed. Me too, of course. Will the book do well, a vague term for a bundle of related concepts around sales and reviews and reception. Will my editors be disappointed in me (if you are my editor you do not have to email to tell me whether you are disappointed in me, it is now more than three months since the book came out and my brain is working again). If it flops will I ever sell another book. Will I Earn Out. Will Anyone Read It. Will My High School Frenemies See It On A Table And Be Slightly Impressed. I’m really hoping it’s more possible to be a normal person around book 2 and into the future, because this level of obsessive fretting is exhausting.
The advice that everyone kept repeating in various debut chat groups was: well, you’ve written the best book you can, it’s out of your hands now! Just relax! Groups of us handing the advice round and round and never using it ourselves, like an infinitely regiftable panettone that nobody actually wants to eat.
I don’t look at Goodreads and obviously I don’t know anyone’s sale numbers or reviews or events schedule — and even where I do have a sense that a particular book is widely talked about, or stocked in a lot of bookshops, or where I saw that it was on a bestseller list or a bunch of end-of-year best-of lists or whatever else, I don’t know how much money the publisher spent on it, or how much time went into marketing, or what the writer was hoping would happen, what would make them happy. Writers worrying about “doing well” doesn’t happen in isolation; it’s not like there’s a certain point where a bell goes off and that’s it, you’ve Done Well or you haven’t, you can stop thinking about it. It’s partly about context, “did your book do what your publishers were hoping it would”, “do its sales reflect the amount of money that was spent on it”, “did that person you sort-of hate that you know also wants to write a novel notice that it came out”, “what does this mean for your careeeeeer”, and how that intersects with the different ways that people make a living from, or while, writing, “did it get the sort of reviews that mean you could get a teaching job, if you wanted?”, “did it sell a lot of copies and now you should put another one out ASAP to capitalise on that momentum but you haven’t even started writing it yet and it didn’t do SO well that you can quit your day job, oh no?”, “did the people who read it like it enough that they’ll be interested in your next one?”.
But inasmuch as I had any idea of how things were going for the books I read, I found that the questions of “is the book good” and “did the book do well” were — well, not as entirely disconnected as I’d expected, honestly? There are a bunch of books I read that I am pretty sure did well and that I thought were incredible. There were a few books that did well that I picked up and flicked through in bookshops and though “ah, this one’s probably not for me”, but even then it wasn’t usually “…and I don’t know what anyone sees in it”.
BUT, of course, it absolutely didn’t work the other way around. There were a lot of books I loved where it felt like they didn’t get the attention they merited, or at least haven’t had that attention yet.
I mean, of course there were, we all know this about books and about everything else. Because:
3. THERE ARE A LOT OF DEBUTS
Like I said, I read I think a statistically unusual number of debut novels this year and there were at least another forty on my want-to-read list. Hundreds and hundreds of others that didn’t seem like my thing, presumably many more that I just didn’t hear about.
This is why debut writers are always asking people to preorder or post or tag them or rate their book on goodreads / amazon / wherever. There are so many books that it’s hard to get the people who would love yours to notice it. And whether they do is mostly in the hands of a publisher’s sales team, their marketing people, booksellers, does someone at Audible happen to listen to your audiobook because the title reminds them of a cafe they used to go to and then it turns out they really like it, does someone with a big tiktok account find a copy in a little free library, a mix of decisions that are out of your hands and moments of random chance. So you try to do the tiny things because it feels like you shouldn’t be doing nothing. Drunkenly force a friend to preorder, make a chirpy little instagram post.
I think people tend to ease off on this for later books, maybe because they’re more able to accept that it’s gonna be a little bit random and there’s not much you can personally do, maybe because they have an existing readership that they hope they can reach again and they’re focused on that, or maybe just because if you don’t become less anxious about it all it gets really really boring? Dunno.
4. “DOESN’T READ LIKE A DEBUT”.
Before this project I didn’t really get what people meant when they would say this doesn’t feel like a debut about a book. Perhaps because I rarely paid conscious attention to whether something was a debut or not? But last year, when I took a break from debuts and read someone’s third or sixth or tenth book, it was often a little bit of a relief. Maybe the books felt a little bit weirder, or a little bit more relaxed into the writer’s preoccupations, or a little less eager to fit in everything just in case this was the only chance the writer ever got.
Not a matter of the debuts being worse: just maybe a little more anxious to please.
Thinking about this made me excited to get on with writing, actually — not for the sake of the second book, but for the sake of, say, a fourth. Imagine writing a fourth novel! And it made me excited to think that — years from now — I’ll be able to read a seventh book by someone whose debut I read in 2024.
5. THIS PROJECT WAS EXPENSIVE AND UNWIELDY
If you’re reading a lot of debuts and you want to do it on paper, you basically have to buy a whole bunch of hardbacks. Often the books just aren’t out in paperback; and they’re probably not in stock at the library yet, or maybe they are but because they’re new there’s a big waiting list.
I’m not generally a hardback reader, and I was kind-of shocked by how much space these all take up, how difficult they made it to take two or three books around with me so I could decide what to read depending on my mood.
Plus usually I’m a big “buy a book because it looks interesting and then put it on a shelf and read it in a month or a year or five years” shopper, so I’m very much used to looking at a book on my shelves and going “oh yeah I should get around to that” when it’s something I bought in paperback. But looking at a hardback book I bought and haven’t read still makes me go oh my god I spent TWENTY POUNDS on that and I haven’t even READ it. Maybe I NEVER WILL. What is WRONG with me.
(It’s not even a problem that I spent that twenty pounds! The Husbands has been “doing well”, I think, by most measures; a bunch of people bought it and probably someone will, if it’s any good, want to publish my next book, therefore I can look at a hardback book that I bought and didn’t read and that’s fine! But it doesn’t stop me having the thought, every time.)
It is, honestly, wonderful and confusing to me that anyone would buy a debut novel in hardback if they are neither a personal friend of the writer nor about to embark on some overelaborate reading project. Just going: yeah, why not, I will spend this money and commit to owning this large object, haven’t read anything by them before, hope it’s good! If you bought a hardback copy of The Husbands, uh, thank you? Incredible? I love you? The paperback is out in March? If you bought a book by any debut author you are helping hundreds of fretful weirdos to fret a tiny bit less, and hundreds of books to make their way in the world, and you are a miracle.
AND NOW, RECOMMENDATIONS
That said, a lot of the 2024 debuts I read are out in paperback already, and the rest will be soon. So if you feel like picking one of them up, here’s a last arrangement of piles:
This time the piles are basically just: vibes. What sort of person would I recommend the books to. (And if a book is there, I liked it; I’m a big abandoner of books I’m not enjoying.)
For people who are a bit stressed out and want to read something where a lot of stuff happens, but you do feel like you can trust that it’ll probably be okay in the end. (Em Reed’s More Bugs, Erin Baldwin’s Wish You Weren’t Here, Julie Leong’s The Teller of Small Fortunes, Kate Young’s Experienced).
For people who aren’t particularly stressed out, and would like to be. (Tracy Sierra’s Nightwatching, Celine Saintclare’s Sugar, Baby, Monika Kim’s The Eyes Are The Best Part, Elle Machray’s Remember, Remember, Scott Preston’s The Borrowed Hills, Amy Twigg’s Spoilt Creatures).
For people who want a book with so much stuff happening that they don’t have time to think about whether they’re stressed out or not. (Kamilah Cole’s So Let Them Burn, Cindy R.X. He’s Perfect Little Monsters, Jill Tew’s The Dividing Sky, Clare Edge’s Accidental Demons, Sophie Wan’s Women of Good Fortune).
For people who want a love story, but they don’t want to be sure whether it’s going to end happily. (John Wiswell’s Someone You Can Build A Nest In, Avery Cunningham’s The Mayor of Maxwell Street, Emet North’s In Universes, Phoebe McIntosh’s Dominoes, Madeleine Gray’s Green Dot, Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time).
For people who want to have some complicated family feelings, maybe a little cry. (Eunice Hong’s Memento Mori, Sofia Robleda’s Daughter of Fire, Jennie Godfrey’s The List of Suspicious Things, Varaidzo’s Manny and the Baby, Leo Vardiashvili’s Hard By A Great Forest).
For people who want something that really cares about the nitty-gritty of work (and money, and power, and abuse of power). (Myah Ariel’s When I Think of You, Betty Cayouette’s One Last Shot, Naomi Kanakia’s The Default World, Chloe Turner’s Blue Hawk, Zarina Muhammad and Gabrielle de la Puente's Poor Artists, Ela Lee’s Jaded, Elizabeth Staple’s The Snap, Ashton Lattimore’s All We Were Promised).
For people who want something that really goes for it, something that’s strange and intense and commits to its bit and is quite hard to explain. (Zito Madu’s The Minotaur at Calle Lanza, Maud Woolf’s Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock, Ella Frears’ Goodlord, Yasmin Zaher’s The Coin, Canisia Lubrin’s Code Noir, Kelly Link’s The Book of Love).
For people whose taste is so perfect that it’s a bit intimidating. (Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot, Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep, Miranda Pountney’s How To Be Somebody Else, Ferdia Lennon’s Glorious Exploits, Oisín McKenna’s Evenings and Weekends, Scott Alexander Howard’s The Other Valley, Rae Giana Rashad’s The Blueprint - I don’t know why these are all cream/orange/yellow, I guess that’s the colour scheme for people with perfect taste at the moment).
For people who make fun of their friends with intimidatingly perfect taste behind their backs. (Madeline Docherty’s Gender Theory, Nathan Newman’s How To Leave The House, Jane Flett’s Freakslaw, Rebecca K Reilly’s Greta & Valdin, Anoushka Warden’s I’m Fucking Amazing, Natalie Sue’s I Hope You Find This Well, and no, I don’t know why these ones are all the same colour either — maybe that’s what pink spines mean).
Okay, we made it. That’s it, that’s all my thoughts.
I started writing this extremely long newsletter assuming my conclusion would be: look I enjoyed that year of reading debuts, but I am so excited to have a year where I exclusively read books published in eg 1931 and written by people who had written a minimum of three other novels beforehand. But — now that I’m at the end, I’ve kind-of talked myself out of that.
And look, there are a whole lot of 2025 debuts to be excited about.
Best,
Holly