The Best 2024 Debuts

Hard as it is to believe, we’re getting to the end of the year and we have a whole range of lists coming your way to summarise some of our favourite and most recommended reads from the past eleven or so months. We’re kicking off with debut novels, a category that offered up so many amazing new voices this year. 

Rita Bullwinkel - Headshot

Longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, Rita Bullwinkel’s debut novel is strikingly original. It follows eight teenage girls who are at a boxing tournament in Reno, Nevada. Going deep into their emotions, imaginations and desires, Headshot is punctuated by flashes of tenderness, humour and pathos. Taking a strange and unexplored world and illuminating it, this book is about young women fighting, and about envy, perfection, purpose and much more.

Pemi Aguda - Ghostroots

Though this is a story collection and not a novel, it’s a strikingly good debut that’s already getting plenty of praise. Set in Lagos, Nigeria, Aguda’s stories unfold against a spectral cityscape where the everyday business of living is charged with an air of supernatural menace. Exploring ancestral ties, modern urban life, and much more in a brilliantly speculative voice, these thirteen tales are well worth exploring.

Yael van der Wouden - The Safekeep

The Safekeep is an exhilarating, twisted tale of desire, suspicion and obsession between two women staying in the same house in the Dutch countryside during the summer of 1961. It’s about the legacy of the past, about family and trauma, and plotted brilliantly. Mysterious, sophisticated, and intriguing, this is another one that was in contention for this year’s Booker and many argue it would’ve been a worthy winner. 

Urzsula Honek - White Nights

Another debut story collection, White Nights is themed around death, poverty, dissapointment, brutality, and futility, written by  a Polish poet. These interconnected tales follow a group of poeple who grew up in the same village in southern Poland, and capture some of the ennui of aspiration and hopelessness in a place that feels forgotten by the larger world around them. Longlisted for the International Booker, it’s a sensitive and interesting read that gives its characters real depth. 

Oisin McKenna - Evenings and Weekends

This taut and propulsive debut follows a cast of intricately linked characters during the  course of one weekend in London in 2019. There’s a heatwave, four old acquaintances are all dealing with different circumstances and desires. On the longest day of the year, their lives intersect at a party and simmering tensions and resentments bubble up. Poignant, urbane and wonderfully written, it’s one to bookmark, literally. 

Yasmin Zaher - The Coin 

A bold, unabashed novel about a young Palestinian woman's unraveling, far from home, as she gets caught up in a scheme reselling Birkin bags. Yasmin Zaher’s first book follows a teacher at a school for underprivileged boys in New York who befriends a swindler and begins to fall apart in various ways. Juxtaposing luxury and the abject, materiality and class, sexuality and oppression, all with a stunning fresh voice, The Coin is not just one of the best debuts of the year, but one of its best novels. 

Colin Barrett - Wild Houses

Though this is a debut novel, Colin Barrett is already one of the masters of the short story form, whose work has been acclaimed for many years. His earlier collections were excellent, and he brings the same brilliance and dark humour to Wild Houses, a book about crimes of desperation, dreams abandoned, and small-town secrets. Centered around a kidnapping in rural Ireland, this is vintage Barrett - moving, sharp, funny and unmissable. 

Monica Datta - Thieving Sun 

This debut novel from an academic is a small, experimental book structured around microtonal music scales. It follows Julienne, a sculpture student, and Gaspar, a composer, who meet in college, spend the next decade together, then drift apart. Told in short passages through its musical device, the book follows Julienne and Gaspar to Syria, China, Germany and elsewhere until tragedy strikes. It’s about tragedy, art and love, and it’s worth the effort.