The 10 Best Debut Novels of 2012
on Dec
10, 2012
This
year, all are agreed, was a pretty great one for books — but it was a
particularly good one for debut novelists, which impressed us over and over
again with their ingenuity, seriousness, and talent. This year’s debuts ran the
gamut from sci-fi masterpieces to realistic war novels, with several
magic-tinged worlds floating around in between. Looks like the novel/this
insufferably ironic generation/reading itself isn’t a lost cause after all.
Read on for our favorite debut novels of the year, and since we already had to
tearfully eliminate quite a few from our list of loves, feel free to add them
back on for us in the comments.
“The war tried to kill us in the spring,” Powers’s
deft coming-of-age novel begins, delicately poetic. A beautifully dark,
harrowing story of war and friendship, this may be the best novel yet to come
out of the Iraq war.
In Brunt’s dazzling debut novel, 15-year-old June is
left despairing after her beloved uncle Finn, a renowned painter, dies of AIDS.
At his funeral, she hunts down his shadowy lover, Toby, and the two begin a
tenuous friendship, leaning on each other to build something new. Crackling
with feeling and raw talent, this novel will transport you.
We’ve been big fans of this book since it first
appeared this October, and how could we not be? It merges our two favorite
things — old books and the internet — giving each powerful force its due. Also
there is a band of merry nerds on a quest to find the truth about a book cult.
Seriously, why have you not read this yet?
This satisfying genre-bender is as much a thriller as
it is an epic fantasy as it is a modern literary debut — and if that’s got your
head a-buzzing, just wait. Alif is a hacker for hire, dodging the government
while lending his skills to internet porn kings, trying to hang on to a Very
Important Text and nursing a cyberspace crush. And then comes the djinn.
Because some demons need tech support. Oh yes.
We know, we know — another
novel about the Iraq war? But hey, don’t blame it on us, blame it on the
times. While The
Yellow Birds is being
hailed as the All
Quiet on the Western Front of the Iraq wars, Billy Lynn has been deemed the modern Catch-22 — no less blistering or true, but a
hell of a lot more post-modern. It all comes down to what you’re in the mood
for.
If you’ve been paying any attention at all, you
already know this, but we love, love, love Amelia Gray. This a horror novel, a
fantasy novel, a realistic story told in metaphor, a metaphorical story told
with cruel realism. It’s
beyond weird, and beyond good.
We’ve described this explosive debut
(literally and figuratively!) as The
Things They Carried meets How Should a Person Be?, and we’re sticking to that.
But beyond the flash of the subject matter — teenage girls in the Israeli
Defense Forces, with all the violence, sex and soul-searching that implies —
this is a novel that’s lingered in our minds for months.
An extraordinary debut, Barry’s City of Bohane is a
brutal, hilarious, inventive romp set in 2053 Ireland, where the scariest gang
in the city is called the Fancy and Gant is on a mission to get his girl back.
Irvine Welsh called this “the best novel to come out of Ireland since Ulysses,”
and while we couldn’t definitively say the same (we’ve read woefully few, we
fear), we’re willing to believe.
09 Shine Shine Shine, Lydia
Netzer
A love story set between here and the
moon, between “normal” and “real,” between head coverings of various kinds,
Netzer’s debut is quirky but grounded, a winning combination. And
a little expert storytelling doesn’t hurt at all.
10 The twelve tribes of
Hattie, Ayana Mathis
This novel, an impressive
decades-spanning page-turner about a young woman and her family enduring
hardships and turbulent times in the early half of the 20th century, should have been on next year’s list of best
debuts, but had its publication date moved abruptly forward when Oprah chose it
as the second pick for her Book Club 2.0. Anything that Oprah ”really, really, really loves” is a pretty solid pick, but we
think this accomplished debut would have made it even without her accolades.
http://www.flavorwire.com/354288/the-10-best-debut-novels-of-2012/view-all
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