April AuthorCAT- Debut Authors

This month’s Author CAT is Debut Authors. Debut authors are usually unknown, and who have their first novel published. However, there are instances where a first-time novelist has been previously published in nonfiction, magazines, or literary journals, and opt to publish their first work of fiction or full-length novel. Lastly, many well-known authors become well known for their later works and their debut works are lesser known. Listed below are a few debut novels from the last 10 years. Please note that my focus here is fiction because that is most of my reading.

2012- The Snow Child, The Light Between Oceans, A Man Called Ove, The Yellow Birds
2013- A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, Burial Rites, You Are One of Them
2014- Everything I Never Told You, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, An Untamed State
2015- The Turner House, The Sympathizer, Eileen, How to Walk Away
2016- Homegoing, Here Comes the Sun, All the Birds in the Sky, The Dry
2017- Stay With Me, Lincoln in the Bardo, Conversations with Friends, The Hate U Give
2018- Where the Crawdads Sing,There There, The Incendiaries
2019- Disappearing Earth, The Water Dancer, Such a Fun Age, Queenie
2020- Shuggie Bain, Valentine, A Burning, The Girl with the Louding Voice, The Thursday Murder Club
2021- Milk, Blood Heat, How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House,The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois , No One is Talking About This, The Sweetness of Water

Established Authors- Debut Novels
Zadie Smith- White Teeth
Kate Atkinson- Behind the Scenes at the Museum
Barbara Kingsolver- The Bean Trees
Walter Mosely- Devil in a Blue Dress
Toni Morrison- The Bluest Eye
Donna Tartt- The Secret History
Agatha Christie- The Mysterious Affair at Styles

There are many more books not listed here, hopefully there is something listed that appeals to you either here or tagged "debut novel". Hopefully all of the touchstones go to the correct books, but let me know if there is something that I missed. Have fun with your discoveries and let everyone know what you decide to read.

I often forget the wiki, but it is here: https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/2022_AuthorCAT

I'm going to read The Ruby's Curse, by Alex Kingston, for this challenge. Alex Kingston played River Song on Doctor Who, and this is her first novel. It came out last year and I've been looking for the perfect excuse to read it :)

My book club's choice for April is The Forgetting Time, which was Sharon Guskin's first novel.

I also have Soho Noir, an omnibus volume of T. S. Hunter's novels, which includes his debut, Tainted Love, and The Thursday Murder Club, Richard Osman's debut.

Our book club book for May is The First 15 Lives of Harry August, a debut novel by Claire North and since our meeting is early in the month, I'll read this in Apr.

I have Valentine by Elizabeth Wetmore, The Fever Tree by Jennifer McVeigh, and Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi all set aside for next month.

I'm hoping to read Lorna Cook's The Forgotten Village, but I've got quite an ambitious reading plan for April so I might not get to it.

>5 DeltaQueen50: Hi Judy, Valentine and Homegoing were both 5 star reads for me if I recall correctly, I hope you enjoy them!

>7 lsh63: Thanks, Lisa. I am looking forward to both of them. I feel like the last person on earth to be reading Homegoing!

So many from which to choose. I will need to go through my TBR to find something appropriate. I can vouch for The Dry, The Light Between Oceans, Lincoln in the Bardo,The Tiger's Wife and Where the Crawdad Sings. I literally loved Burial Rites.

I have There There by Tommy Orange that I plan to read.

I have a few to choose from:
Wild Awake / Hilary T. Smith
White Chrysanthemum / Mary Lynn Bracht
Something Missing / Matthew Dicks

I'm thinking about Colette's first book: Claudine at School.

I'm starting to get a bit stressed out about challenges, and taking longer than a month to read some of them, so I've decided that I'll only read my choice for this CAT later in the year when I feel a bit less fraught. Every so often I want to pick out some fiction from my Jar of Fate, so maybe I'll keep this for the next one of those, to make sure it's read sometime this year! That way I can hopefully catch up on some of the books I'm not going to finish by the end of March.

I've finished this month's read already: Claudine at school by Collette. It's Collette's first book, publisjhed in 1900 under her husband Willy's name. An unusual school!

I have finished Ellbogen which is about a Turkish-descended teenager in Berlin and left me rather confused.

I just finished Such A Fun Age.

I read Broken Places by Tracy Clark.

Broken Places is the first in a series about a private detective in Chicago. Cass Raine is an African-American woman who used to be a police officer. She is one of my favorite PI characters I have read in a long time. In this novel, she is trying to solve the murder of her good friend, a priest at the local Catholic church. The mystery was interesting and although I predicted the culprit pretty early on, I enjoyed following Cass as she followed the clues and figured it out. I especially liked all of the supporting characters. Cass has an eclectic group of friends that added just the right amount of comic relief. I will definitely continue reading this series.

COMPLETED Soho Noir by T. S. Hunter. As far as I can tell, this collection of novellas includes the author's debut.

My review:
A collection of six novellas set in 1980s Soho, each sharing a title with a hit song from the period or the previous decade.

Pros:
The mysteries were fairly straightforward but still kept the reader's attention.
The story title/song title gimmick provides a clue to where the reader's focus should be without giving too much away.
The setting felt authentic enough to make me wonder if it was part of the author's lived experience.
I liked the fact that although the two detectives were both gay and were flatmates they were not a couple and each had their own love life.

Cons:
The prose was a bit clunky, particularly in expository parts.
Some repetition from story to story so perhaps a compilation was not the best way to read them.
The corrupt, homophobic cop was a bit of a pantomime villain and although it is implied in the last story that he gets his comeuppance, we don't actually get to see it so presumably he could still appear in any future stories.

Would I read any future stories by this author? Definitely.

I just realized that the last two books that I read were the author's debut books, and both were very good. Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi was a 5 star read and Where All Light Tends To Go by David Joy was a 4+ star read.

Journey Toward Justice / Dennis Fritz
4 stars

In 1982, Debbie Carter was raped and murdered in Ada, Oklahoma. Four or five years later, Dennis Fritz and his friend Ronnie Williamson were arrested. Dennis knew nothing at all about the murder, but he was tried and sentenced to life in prison, based on next-to-no evidence. In prison, Dennis spent as much time as he possibly could in the law library to figure out how to prove his innocence and get out of there. Finally, after 11 (12?) years, DNA set him (and Ron) free.

The is the same murder covered in John Grisham’s “The Innocent Man”, though Grisham focused on Ronnie, and of course was an outsider’s point of view, whereas Fritz’s book is a memoir, so we see what all happened through his own eyes – an innocent men arrested and on trial for a murder he knew nothing about. Interesting book (and frustrating – between the lack of evidence to begin with and all those letters Dennis wrote to higher and higher levels of court to try to get someone to listen to him!).

Dennis did learn a lot about how the law works while he was in prison, and there were times in the book where he used legal terms and phrases and I wasn’t quite sure what exactly he meant, though the gist was there. But a bit of an explanation would have been nice. Oh, and Dennis was a single dad with a 13-year old daughter at the time of his arrest, so really sad that his daughter had to go through that, as well.

I just finished A Song of Wraiths and Ruin by Roseanne A. Brown, a YA fantasy rooted in West African mythology.

I am reading After Me Comes the Flood by Sarah Perry. This is her debut novel, so I think I can use it here and for random Cat.

Finished After Me Comes the Flood.

Fifty Words for Rain I loved it, not everyone did. See my comments here.
https://www.librarything.com/topic/338552#7811377

May's author category is up; https://www.librarything.com/topic/341220

I finished Swimming Back to Trout River, a debut novel for Linda Rui Feng, published in 2021. It's a historical fiction novel set during the Cultural Revolution in China.

I read Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts by Rebecca Hall.

COMPLETED My Sister, the Serial Killer, a debut novel by Oyinkan Braithwaite

I read Nella Larsen's first book, Quicksand.

This is not a novel, but it is the author's first book: Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle by Clare Hunter. There is so much history and activism in this book, it makes me want to visit a textile museum.

>30 soelo: That has been sitting near the top of my stash for several months, but I always end up grabbing something else. Honestly, if I weren't in a reading slump, it probably would have been read.

I finished another debut novel Peach Blossom Spring. It was a very good historical fiction read .

Another debut novel -- The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain.

Wild Awake / Hilary T. Smith
3 stars

Kiri’s parents are away on a cruise and have left her on her own. I think she’s 17? She is part of a musical duo with her best friend, Lukas, and they have Battle of the Bands coming up. Kiri is also a very good piano player and has a test(? competition?) coming up. When she receives a strange phone call about her (long-dead) sister, she learns something (big) her parents never told her about her sister’s death. This starts a series of events that has Kiri spiralling out of control.

I didn’t like Kiri, nor many of the choices she made. The book became kind of chaotic as we moved more and more toward the end. I did like the Vancouver setting – it’s always fun recognizing places. I also thought the idea of Kiri never learning what she does about her sister’s death until the start of this book (5 years later) is pretty unrealistic. I can’t imagine she wouldn’t have heard it somewhere, even if not from her parents or brother. The book still (at least more at the start and throughout the first half or so) interested me enough to consider it “ok”.

There There by Tommy Orange

This powerful novel is wise and insightful as it relates the stories of twelve Native Americans who attend a Powwow in Oakland. Orange captured the individuality of each character yet showed the common problems they face. It's an astonishing debut. Highly recommended.

Starting Amor Towles's debut Rules of Civility

I read another debut novel this month, Peach Blossom Spring which was excellent.

I have finished The namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri.

Read Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid, debut novel about racism and white supremacy.

I chose Special Topics In Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl for this challenge.

I've read The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed by Lee Smith which she wrote when she was still a student at Hollins College in Virginia although it was published a little later. It's the story of a summer for Susan, a 9-year-old girl, and her friends, and involves a lot of fantasy. During the summer a boy, a nephew of a neighbor, comes and demands that the children do cruel things his make-believe friend says they should. In addition to this, Susan experiences the breakup of her parents' marriage.

I just found out that the books I was planning to read for this is actually not the author's debut novel because she wrote other novels under other names. Oh well ... (see post #4)

>43 dudes22: I was going to count a spontaneous, just because I feel like it, book for this challenge but then also found that the author was using a pen name and had previously published under his own name.

COMPLETED Rules of Civility, Amor Towles's debut