Maris Kreizman Recommends Her Favorites
If you published a debut novel in 2026 and it wasn’t called Yesteryear, I have no doubt that your work could use some more love. So I’ve compiled this list of my favorite debut novels of the year at a time when it has become harder than ever to get coverage for works of fiction by authors without a proven track record.
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Please note that I would never be so bold as to call these books the “best.” I am one person and there are hundreds of debut novels that were published in 2026. But these are the ones I was fortunate enough to come across and that couldn’t stop thinking about.
The novels appear in alphabetical order by author name.
The structure of A Real Animalis a true feat: the novel can feel playful and incisive in depicting the mundanities of a young woman’s day to day in her early twenties, and then out of nowhere something terrible can happen to its heroine and leave the reader reeling. It’s kind of like life: the thing you’ve been dreading and replaying in your mind, and the thing that will actually pummel you, are often quite different. Emeline Atwood’s debut beautifully captures the unpredictability of a life in the making.
Bindu Bansinath, Men Like Ours
Men Like Ours is narrated by the women who reside in an Indian-American immigrant community in a section of the New Jersey suburbs where everyone seems to know everyone else’s business (or at least they think they do). What starts as a seemingly gossipy romp through the women’s Whats App group about the ways our neighbors help us and hurt us with their constant spying, turns into a murder mystery that reveals the darker corners of the women’s lives.
Pool Housewas the novel of the summer because it has emotional heft and a stunning depiction of a less-than-perfect mother-daughter relationship but it’s not so heavy that it could ruin your day. It’s fun to watch these characters fight and flail, especially when their daily lives are disrupted by a house guest. The novel is narrated by Moon, is a C-list actress who has been living well beyond her means; her 20 year-old daughter Stevie, who is still figuring out who she wants to be; and Adam, a man who once played Moon’s step-son on a TV sitcom and who has come for a visit. With each shift in narration we’re made to question the reality of everything we were told before.
Malavika Kannan, Unprecedented Times
The definitive Gen Z covid novel is here. It features a protagonist who is my favorite kind of character: the know-it-all who knows next to nothing, the kind who resembles characters like Jane Austen’s Emma and Selin in Elif Batuman’s The Idiot. In Rishi, Malavika Kannan introduces us to the kind of college freshman who is undeniably book smart but also terrible at reading the room. Rishi’s first semester of college, describes to us in painstaking detail, takes place at the end of 2019 so even as we watch her revel in new found freedom, all the while we know that a huge narrative disruption is imminent.
In Isabel Kim’s adult sci-fi debut, the act of immigration does not simply lead to a metaphorical splitting of a person in two. In the world of the book the split is also quite literal.Sublimation is the story of Soyoung, a girl who leaves Seoul in the 1980s to move with her mother to the US, and the other version of her that has come into existence: the old Soyoung remains in South Korea, while the American version of her, who looks and thinks exactly the same but who has an entirely different life experience, is known as Rose. The high concept premise leads to lots of hijinks, but Sublimation is ultimately a bittersweet meditation on leaving one’s ancestral home.
An explosive, unremittingly dark novel about the murder of a pedophile and the search to find who did it, Whidbeyis told, for the most part, from three different points of view: two are the young women who were molested as girls in Florida by the bus driver’s son, Calvin, and the third is Calvin’s long-suffering mother. When Calvin turns up dead at the halfway house where he’d been residing, the narrators’ paths intertwine. More than a mere story of retribution,Whidbey is a meditation on how we want our victims to be and the stories we want them to tell.
Christine is a former artist turned author who s wish fulfillment She’s recent’y written an autobiographical novel in which a fictional version of her gets even with the much older art professor with whom she’d once had an affair. When Christine reunites with her former teacher post-book, Disciplinebecomes a novel about the inadequacies of fiction, asking big questions about art and what its purpose is. Can autobiographical fiction ever lead to revelation or catharsis? Or does the making of art simply help the artist to hide behind another layer of artifice?
Delbar is an Afghani American gay man who flees to Turkey after his mother banishes him. There he meets Mansur, another Afghani refugee from Iran whose family has also rejected him. Told from both of the men’s alternating points of view as their lives overlap briefly via PeaceMeals, a weekly dinner for queer and trans refugees in Istanbul. Don’t expect No God But Usto be one of those inspiring stories in which a ragtag group of outcasts comes together to triumph over oppressive forces. Sayed gives us a messier, more realistic story about who gains access to social safety nets and who doesn’t and the novel is all the better for it.
Do we ever get over anything? If so, how? Avigayl Sharp’s audacious and bitingly funny debut explores what we do with the weight of things that happened in the past – our own and our ancestors. The main character in Offseason, a 28 year-old PhD program dropout who spends a year teaching English at a girls’ boarding school in an East coast seaside town, can’t resist talking about all of her “truths” and the “generational trauma” from which she suffers. This is Weird Girl fiction in which the heroine is insistent on laying outwhyshe’s weird, but even so there are no easy answers.
Nafissa Thompson-Spires, The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Richard Milford
Debut novels are usually the territory of young people trying to figure out life from the first person point of view. Which is why Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s debut is particularly thrilling: it’s historical fiction narrated by the all-Black town of Newville, Oklahoma beginning shortly after the Tulsa Massacre of 1921. Its the story of one awful man and all of the women who might want him dead. What really happened to the scoundrel Richard Milford? The novel offers some good ideas. Bonus: The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Richard Milfordis the kind of novel that feels sweeping and big, but it clocks in at less than 200 pages.
A Real AnimalAvigayl SharpBindu BansinathBobuq Sayeddebut novelsdisciplineEmeline AtwoodIsabel J. KimLarissa PhamMalavika KannanMaris KreizmanMary H.K. ChoiMen Like OursNafissa Thompson-SpiresNo God But UsOffseasonPool HousesublimationT Kira MaddenThe Four Wives and Five Deaths of Richard MilfordUnprecedented TimesWhidbey
Maris Kreizman
Maris Kreizman hosted the literary podcast, The Maris Review, for four years. Her essays and criticism have appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Esquire, The New Republic, and more. Her essay collection, I Want to Burn This Place Down, is forthcoming from Ecco/HarperCollins.
