As with reprint titles, so too with debut fiction: the category can be a very useful indicator of the health of the industry as a whole. This might be particularly true in 2021, when the market would start to see the first fruits of the COVID-19 pandemic that simultaneously gave every author in the world all the endless amounts of free time they're always whining about needing and also created an atmosphere of dread and loneliness perfectly designed to prey on their delicate little psyches. But whether through timing or robust mental health or just the fact that nobody was home at the publishing houses, 2021's debut fiction was largely strong. These were the best:

10 Bride of the Sea by Eman Quotah (Tin House Books) - It might seem a fairly parlous gambit, to start a Debut Fiction list with a book so crammed with both current-year Twitter politics and autofiction, but this first work from Eman Quotah - about a child torn between two families and two cultures - has all that and more yet still manages to be glowingly heartfelt.

9 Something Wonderful by Jo Lloyd (Tin House Books) - I’d ordinarily be equally leery of including a short story collection on this list, since the energy (and often the skill set) for writing a string of stories over two or three years is necessarily different from what it takes to craft a novel. But again, the actual performance outweighs such considerations: Jo Lloyd’s stories in this debut collection are marvels of compression and wit, taking readers far, far from the well-trod ground of upper middle class Connecticut divorce.

8 The Four Humors by Mina Seckin (Catapult) - This story of a Turkish-American woman returning to the family home in Istanbul (and to a vast entanglement of duties and worries in the wake of her father’s death) fully inhabits the worryingly anti-science trend among young people - the author is very young, and nobody in the novel makes all that strong a point of mentioning that the “four humors” of the title are not, in fact, legitimate medicine - but the personal portraits in these pages, including of the main character’s wonderfully clueless American boyfriend, are plenty compensation enough.

7 Paradise, Nevada by Dario Diofebi (Bloomsbury) - Every year, at least one or two books on this list will follow a pattern: they’ll be 500 pages long or more, sweeping in scope, and gaudy with all the exuberant overreach we typically associate with debut works of fiction (90% of them will also have portentous place-names either in the text or as the title - “Second Chance, Texas,” “Heavy Foreshadowing, Wyoming,” and so on - once again, I ask: can we agree to a moratorium on this particular kind of heavy-handed moron-irony?). This book by Dario Diofebi, about a small band of misfits who find their combined destinies in 21st-century Las Vegas, fits that pattern and adds one more check I always hope to see: it’s very, very good.

6 Other People's Children by R. J. Hoffmann (Simon & Schuster) - The central plot-line of R. J. Hoffmann’s deceptively powerful debut - a birth mother gives her child up for adoption and then legally changes her mind after the adopting parents have already fallen in love with the baby - sets in motion a wonderfully adult set of narrative complications, and Hoffmann tackles all those complications with spare dialogue, sharply-drawn characters, and a feel for pacing that only deserts her in the book’s final pages - and maybe, just this once, that in-the-lurch feeling was also by design. 

5 How I Learned to Hate in Ohio by David Stuart Maclean (Overlook Press) - David Maclean’s debut novel, about a boy in 1980s small-town Ohio who’s befriended by a Sikh immigrant to his town, alternates with standout skill between snarling social observations and disarmingly warm character-studies. All the heavy issues in these pages - coming-of-age drama, small-town drama, xenophobia - are filtered through a deceptively wry comic sensibility into a truly memorable debut.

4 The Divines by Ellie Eaton (Morrow) - Ellie Eaton’s ice pick of a debut is likewise in large part a coming-of-age drama, but vastly different in its ambit and outlook from most specimens of the type. The story here, of a former student at a prestigious and now-disgraced girls prep school looking back at her formative years, is layered in jarringly tender ironies that’ll stick with you long after you’ve finished the book.

3 The Truants by Kate Weinberg (Putnam) - The note of school-ties fiction runs through Kate Weinberg’s debut as well, but with the twist provided by one darkly charismatic teacher, into whose orbit falls a tight-knit group of wildly different students. And hovering over everything is the ghost of, of all people, Agatha Christie - combining to make a debut that’s both whip-smart and a page-turner. 

2 Are You Enjoying? By Mira Sethi (Knopf) - We wind down the list as we began it, with yet another short story collection that’s simply too good to leave off on some point of principle. Many of the lancing-sharp stories in this debut collection capture aspects of life in 21st-century Pakistan in fresh-feeling ways, but the deeper sentiments running through them all - questions of identity and yearning foremost among them - know no national boundaries. Some stories are stronger than others here, but this collection marks the arrival of a promising new voice.

1 The Liar's Dictionary by Eley Williams (Anchor) - The split narrative of this completely assured debut by Eley Williams - one strand involving a Victorian lexicographer resorting to increasing desperate and outlandish fraud in his contributions to a dictionary and the other strand involving the present-day publishing intern gradually uncovering these frauds (and becoming more and more interested in the man behind them) - is perfectly balanced with raucously bookish humor, well-realized historical details, and enough trivia to keep fifty English pubs busy for a decade. This novel, the best fiction debut of 2021,  is one of those books that creates a weird and oddly welcoming world the reader doesn’t want to leave.