When it comes to first novels (in most cases), you are just evaluating the book without knowing much about the author. That’s obviously not the case with Hollywood superstar Keanu Reeves’s The Book of Elsewhere (Del Rey, co-writer China Miéville), which is inspired by the BRZRKR comic series and Reeves’s upcoming Netflix film. Given the nature of the prose on a randomly opened page (“this interaction was not to be a liaison of any occulted elect”), there may be more dazzling debuts out there and July is certainly lush with them.
Not all this month’s debuts are by sapling writers. I enjoyed Jane Campbell’s 2022 short story collection Cat Brushing and the octogenarian’s novel Interpretations of Love (Riverrun), set in the 1940s, has moving things to say about grief. Among the other debuts worth checking out are Orlaine McDonald’s No Small Thing (Serpent’s Tail), a taut generational story set on a south London estate; and Essie Chambers’s Swift River (Dialogue), set in a moribund New England mill town and about a lonely teenager called Diamond and her search for the truth about her dead father. Olivia Petter, who writes regularly for The Independent, explores celebrity culture and consent in Gold Rush (4th Estate), a sharp, eye-opening #MeToo tale about what happens when a young PR called Rose has a fling with a famous pop musician.
Poet Hannah Regel deals with young womanhood and a crisis of desire in her moving, lyrical debut The Last Sane Woman (Verso). Debut novels, even ones as accomplished as Paddy Crewe’s My Name Is Yip, are supposedly followed by the “difficult second novel” (a cliche, in any case), but this is certainly not applicable to Crewe’s accomplished second work True Love (Doubleday), an affecting tale of the relationship between Keely and Finn.
