Tag: best debut novels

A man in an ivory robe knocks on the door, compliments the baked ziti, and eats dinner with a family who cannot ask him to leave. He is not there for any of them. He is waiting for the neighbour to get home. That is the first chapter, and it tells you exactly what kind of book this is.

A woman reads the right-hand half of a name badge and spends ten minutes certain the hospital has sent a man to assault her. The badge says occupational therapist. Freida McFadden's early novel is written from inside a brain that cannot perceive its own left side, and the thing it cannot perceive is the thing that was done to it.

A grandfather clock in a 1660 house stops every night at 3:41. Nobody can fix it, and nobody will explain it. Freida McFadden's dual-timeline thriller runs a 1692 witchcraft trial alongside a present-day haunting, and the second reveal turns on an object you have been staring at since chapter four.

Juniper Castillo can hold her pulse at eighty while somebody hits her. Her mother taught her that. Nine years later she is twenty-two, sober, ferociously prepared, and about to spend a press tour explaining her own history to strangers with recording devices. John Green's first adult novel is about what the machine takes.