New year means new beginnings in the world of books, not so much for established novelists – their work tends to hit the shops in the autumn – as for first-time authors. Spring is the season when all the major publishers and, increasingly, the smaller houses too, unveil the fiction debutantes they’re plugging as the next Zadie Smith. The hype can grate but ignore it completely and you might miss a gem: Smith’s White Teeth was a debut, as was The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon and Kathryn Stockett’s The Help. Other superb first novels picked out by the Observer New Review in our annual look at the coming year’s debut fiction have included Jessie Burton’s The Miniaturist, Emma Healey’s Elizabeth Is Missing, The Versions Of Us by Laura Barnett and Janet Ellis’s The Butcher’s Hook. This year’s writers take on subjects as diverse as PTSD, online obsession, alcoholism and witch-hunting. However, the scarcity of new black and ethnic minority writers is a problem publishers need urgently to address. (A recent survey revealed that writers called David are more likely to get into the bestseller charts than BAME authors.) Two new awards, the Guardian… Read full this story
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