Fiction Debuts 2010

A list featuring some selected first novels and debut short story collections (mostly hardcover). This list may not be comprehensive. First novel information is collected from a variety of sources. Annotations are from Advance, the Ingram Book Magazine - unless otherwise noted

• Forest Gate
  Author: Akinti, Peter
  $ 14 ISBN: 9781439172179 Date: 2010
  LJ
  A violent and sexy first novel, Forest Gate is set among young Somalian refugees and the miscreants they encounter in the council estates of London.
  Updated 11.20.09
  
• Long for this World
  Author: Chung, Sonya
  $ 25 ISBN: 9781416599623 Date: 2010
  LJ
  In a brilliant, powerful debut, Chung writes about a Korean family divided between America and their small Korean town.
  Updated 2.25.10
  
• Bloodroot
  Author: Greene, Amy
  $ 24.95 ISBN: 9780307269867 Date: 2010
  Booklist
  Named for a flower whose blood-red sap possesses the power both to heal and poison, Bloodroot is a stunning fiction debut about the legacies--of magic and madness, faith and secrets, passion and loss--that haunt one family across the generations.
  Updated 10.27.09
• Anthropology of an American Girl
  Author: Hamann, Hilary Thayer
  $ 25 ISBN: 9780385527149 Date: 2010
  PW Kirkus
  A stunning debut about a young girl's coming of age and finding love, set in East Hampton and Manhattan in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
  Updated 4.14.10
  
• Then Came Morning
  Author: Hart, Brian
  $ 25.95 ISBN: 9781608190140 Date: 2010
  PW
  A riveting, psychologically rich family drama set in the American West, from a writer who has been compared to Cormac McCarthy. Bandy Dorner, home from Vietnam, awakes with his car mired in a canal, his cabin reduced to ashes, and his pregnant wife preparing to leave town with her lover. Within moments, a cop lies bleeding on the road. Eighteen years later, Bandy is released from prison. His parents are gone, but on the derelict family ranch, Bandy faces a different reunion. Tracy, his now teenaged son, has come to claim the father he's never known. Iona, Bandy's ex-wife, has returned on the heels of her son. All three are damaged, hardened, haunted. But warily, desperately, they move in a slow dance around each other, trying to piece back together a family that never was; trying to discover if they belong together at all. With unflinching honesty and restrained beauty, Brian Hart explores the possibilities and limitations of his characters as they struggle toward a shared future. Like a traditional Greek tragedy, suffused with the mud, ice, and rock of the raw I daho landscape, Then Came the Evening is tautly plotted and emotionally complex--a stunning debut. - Publisher Marketing
  Updated 10.27.09
  
• Union Atlantic
  Author: Haslett, Adam
  $ 26 ISBN: 9780385524476 Date: 2010
  PW
  The eagerly anticipated debut novel from the author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist You Are Not a Stranger Here, Union Atlantic, is a deeply affecting portrait of the modern gilded age, the first decade of the 21st century.
  Updated 1.28.10
  
• Saving CeeCee Honeycutt
  Author: Hoffman, Beth
  $ 25.95 ISBN: 9780670021390 Date: 2010
  LJ
  Steel Magnolias meets The Help in this Southern debut novel sparkling with humor, heart, and feminine wisdom. Laugh-out-loud funny, Hoffman's charming work offers the story of a young girl who loses one mother and finds many others.
  Updated 10.27.09
  
• The Gin Closet
  Author: Jamison, Leslie
  $ 25 ISBN: 9781439153215 Date: 2009
  PW
  Jamison's auspicious debut novel is told through the voices of a young woman and her alcoholic aunt.
  Updated 11.25.09
  
• A Thousand Cuts
  Author: Lelic, Simon
  $ 24.95 ISBN: 9780670021505 Date: 2010
  PW Booklist
  A stunning debut novel that unravels the hidden story behind a school shooting. As detective Lucia May pieces together the eyewitnesses' accounts, she begins to realize that she has more in common with the killer than she could have imagined.
  Updated 2.2.10
  
• The Swimming Pool
  Author: Lecraw, Holly
  $ 24.95 ISBN: 9780385531931 Date: 2010
  LJ
  Seven summers ago, Marcella Atkinson fell in love with Cecil McClatchey, a married father of two. But on the same night their romance abruptly ended, Cecil's wife was found murdered--and their lives changed forever, in this powerful debut.
  Updated 2.25.10
  
• Apparition & Late Fictions: A Novella and Stories
  Author: Lynch, Thomas
  $ 24.95 ISBN: 9780393042078 Date: 2010
  Kirkus LJ
  From the award-winning author of The Undertaking comes this debut fiction collection of heart-rending stories of life and death.
  Updated 10.27.09
  
• Matterhorn
  Author: Marlantes, Karl
  $ 24.95 ISBN: 9780802119285 Date: 2010
  PW
  Thirty years in the making, Marlantes's epic debut is a dense, vivid narrative spanning many months in the lives of American troops in Vietnam as they trudge across enemy lines, encountering danger from opposing forces as well as on their home turf.
  Suggested Reading: Vietnam War
  Updated 1.11.10
  
• Proof of Seduction
  Author: Milan, Courtney
  $ 7.99 ISBN: 9780373774395 Date: 2010
  PW
  A debut author delivers a witty and sexy historical tale of a passionate battle of wills between a gifted fortuneteller of humble origins and a marquess sworn to bachelorhood.
  Suggested Reading: Romance
  Updated 11.4.09
  
• The Invisible Bridge
  Author: Orringer, Julie
  $ 26.95 ISBN: 9781400041169 Date: 2010
  Booklist
  Orringer's astonishing first novel is a grand love story and an epic tale of three brothers whose lives are torn apart by war. An unforgettable story of history and love, of marriage tested by disaster, of a Jewish family's struggle against annihilation, and of the dangerous power of art in a time of war.
  Updated 3.18.10
  
• Ruby's Spoon
  Author: Pietroni, Anna
  $ 26 ISBN: 9781400068685 Date: 2010
  Booklist Kirkus
  In its eerie and atmospheric evocation of time and place and its masterful narrative control, this remarkable debut spins a story that is both mythical and mysterious.
  Updated 1.28.10
• Model Home
  Author: Puchner, Eric
  $ 25 ISBN: 9780743270489 Date: 2010
  Kirkus Booklist PW
  The debut of an award-winning writer, Model Home is a bitterly funny, deeply moving novel about a family reckoning with failure, guilt, and love.
  Suggested Reading: All Stars
  Updated 1.28.10
  
• The Imperfectionists
  Author: Rachman, Tom
  $ 25 ISBN: 9780385343664 Date: 2010
  PW LJ
  Set against the gorgeous backdrop of Rome, Tom Rachman's wry, vibrant debut follows the topsy-turvy private lives of the reporters, editors, and executives of an international English language newspaper as they struggle to keep it--and themselves--afloat. - Publisher Marketing
  Updated 1.28.10
  
• The Lotus Eaters
  Author: Soli, Tatjana
  $ 24.99 ISBN: 9780312611576 Date: 2010
  Kirkus LJ
  A unique and sweeping debut novel that follows an American female combat photographer in the Vietnam War as she captures the wrenching chaos and finds herself torn between the love of two men.
  Suggested Reading: Vietnam War
  Updated 2.25.10
  
• Wench
  Author: Valdez, Dolen Perkins
  $ 24.99 ISBN: 9780061706547 Date: 2010
  LJ
  In her debut, Perkins-Valdez eloquently plunges into a dark period of American history . . . Heart-wrenching, intriguing, original, and suspenseful, this novel showcases [the author's] ability to bring the unfortunate past to life.--Publishers Weekly.
  Suggested Reading:Historical Fiction
  Updated 1.28.10
  
• Kapitoil
  Author: Wayne, Teddy
  $ 13.99 ISBN: 9780061873218 Date: 2010
  Booklist
  In a singular and captivating voice, Wayne marks his literary debut with the chronicle of one young Middle Eastern man's attempt to live the American Dream in New York city without sacrificing his ideals.
  Updated 2.23.10
  
• First Annual Grand Prarie Rabbit Festival
  Author: Wheaton, Ken
  $ 15 ISBN: 9780758238528 Date: 2010
  Booklist
  Wheaton blends humor, sarcasm, tenderness, and larger-than-life characters ina dazzling debut, set in small-town Louisiana, that heralds a sharp new voice in Southern fiction.
  Updated 11.20.09
• The Handbook for Lighning Strike Survivors
  Author: Young-Stone, Michele
  $ 24 ISBN: 9780307464477 Date: 2010
  Booklist
  An evocative story of two lost souls united by the extraordinary power of lightning, this wonderfully inventive debut may appeal to fans of Alice Hoffman and Wally Lamb.
  Updated 3.18.10