As the year ends, I always like to look back at the fiction debuts. This year, of course, the Kirkus Prize went to one, Lucas Schaefer’s The Slip (Simon & Schuster, June 3), a wildly entertaining tale revolving around a teenager’s disappearance from a boxing gym in Austin, Texas, in 1998. This is not the stereotypical first novel, slim and autobiographical; among Schaefer’s characters are a Haitian man who works at a rehab center, a female cop, a teen exploring their gender identity, an unhoused man and his twin brother, who’s a clown, and many others whose lives intersect through the missing Nathaniel Rothstein. Our review says that “Schaefer, who’s white, is bold in his approach to issues of Blackness and whiteness, and has invented a truly wild plot in service of exploring them. He is equally fearless in writing about gender and sex. And the solution to the mystery is a trip and a half.” Here are some other excellent first novels that came out this year:
Old School Indian by Aaron John Curtis (Zando, May 6): Abe Jacobs is a poet and a bookseller at a large store in Miami (as is the author, who’s been the quartermaster at Books & Books since 2004). He’s suffering from baffling ailments and a troubled marriage, so he heads to his parents’ house on a Mohawk reservation in upstate New York, where his great-uncle gives him folk treatments and he reconnects with friends and family—while his poetic alter ego, Dominick Deer Woods, breaks into the narrative with snarky commentary. Our starred review calls this “an affecting tale of loss and healing that thrives through its seriocomic style.”
The Hounding by Xenobe Purvis (Henry Holt, Aug. 5): “The girls, the infernal heat, a fresh-dead body”: That’s the opening line, and it hooked me. Set in Oxfordshire soon after the English Civil War, Purvis’ novel tells the story of the newly orphaned Mansfield sisters, ages 6 to 19, whose neighbors are convinced they can turn into dogs. “The novel is a master class in paranoia and strategic ambiguity,” according to our starred review. “Like Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery,’ it shows that the horrors lurking beneath small-town life are timelessly unsettling.”
Dominion by Addie E. Citchens (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Aug. 19): Citchens introduces the prominent Winfrey family of Dominion, Mississippi. The father, Sabre, is the pastor of the Black Baptist church as well as a businessman, but the family is unraveling, especially after the youngest son commits a shocking act of violence. Citchens inhabits the voices of the boy’s mother, Priscilla, and his girlfriend, Diamond, perfectly, according to our starred review. “Nothing in the book is sensationalized,” our critic writes. “This is an important novel that deftly tackles misogyny and hypocrisy. A stunning debut.”
Happiness & Love by Zoe Dubno (Scribner, Sept. 2): Here’s a first novel in the more usual first-novel style: A young New York writer is back home after five years in London. She’s at a dinner party given by a wealthy art-world couple, and she unleashes her conflicted thoughts about the whole scene in what our review calls “a long, acerbic, and sometimes very funny rant.…A minefield of a novel, whose cutting and often brilliant observations will delight and terrify those in the know.”
Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.
