Every December, I like to look back at some of the year’s notable debut novels and story collections, celebrating new voices on the literary scene. Here are six standouts:
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (Avid Reader, May 7): A time-traveling Victorian polar explorer who winds up in 21st-century London. A British civil servant who’s mysteriously given a top-secret mission to babysit the explorer. There’s mystery, drama, romance, and a perceptive look at the challenges of today’s world. Our starred review says, “This rip-roaring romp pivots between past and present and posits the future-altering power of love, hope, and forgiveness.”
Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham (Hogarth, March 12): For his first novel, Cunningham, a cultural critic at the New Yorker, draws on his experience working for candidate Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election. “The campaign’s conclusion is no surprise, of course” according to our starred review, “but the book is alive in its intellectual detours, with Cunningham considering religion, race, sex, film, politics, fatherhood, and more.…A top-shelf intellectual bildungsroman.”
Jellyfish Have No Ears by Adèle Rosenfeld; trans. by Jeffrey Zuckerman (Graywolf, Aug. 6): Louise is deaf in one ear and losing hearing in the other; this striking novel follows her as she decides whether to get a cochlear implant. “At times absurd, but mostly poignant and inventive, the book is really about making sense of the world, exploring the gaps between perception and cognition,” says our starred review.
Yr Dead by Sam Sax (McSweeney’s, Aug. 6): Sax’s first work of fiction is a “poet’s novel through and through,” according to our starred review. The narrator, Ezra—a nonbinary Jew, like the author—lights themself on fire, and their life and the lives of their ancestors flash before their eyes, appearing in vivid fragments. Our review calls the book “meditative, deeply humane, and profoundly original.”
Hombrecito by Santiago Jose Sanchez (Riverhead, June 25): Colombian American author Sanchez introduces a young boy named Santiago and follows him through childhood and young adulthood from Ibagué to Miami and New York and back again. “Part family saga, part coming-of-age story, the novel reckons with issues of abandonment, migration, and gay identity, as Santiago confronts the ripple effects of trauma and separation on his family,” according to our starred review. “Heart-wrenching in its realism, this novel captures the recklessness of young lust and the enduring pain of familial love.”
The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden (Avid Reader, May 28): Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, van der Wouden’s novel opens in 1961 in the Dutch countryside, where Isabel has devoted herself to keeping up the house where her family lived through the war, though she’s the only one still there. When her brother drops off his new girlfriend to spend a few weeks there without him, tensions mount in all sorts of ways. Our starred review says, “This is a beautifully realized book, nearly perfect, as van der Wouden quietly explores…the discovery of desire (and the simultaneous discovery of self), queer relationships at a time when they went unspoken, and the legacy of war and what it might mean to have been complicit in its horrors.”
Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.
