Here are the debut books that caught Debutiful’s eye this month. We think readers will find plenty to love among them.
To see our curated list of standout titles, check out our “16 noteworthy debut books to read in May 2026.”
Continue reading “20 debut books to discover from May 2026”
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Emily Haworth-Booth’s novel, Mare, explores the intricacies and dynamics of relationships with others, yes, but more specifically, with a horse. The unnamed protagonist is emotionally struggling with loss; loss of her dog, loss of the expectations of her body, loss of a life imagined. To cope, she lets a horse as a way to fill her time and her emotions. She learns the difference between need and obsession as she navigates learning and loving her new companion. Mare is a soulful ride that will pull at your heart if you let it.
I talk with Emily about writing for children versus adults, what having a strong literary community means to her, and what’s next from her pen.
Continue reading “Finding Company Elsewhere: Emily Haworth-Booth Discusses Mare”
The following is an excerpt from All Them Dogs by Djamel White. He is an Irish writer and editor living in Dublin. He earned an MFA in creative writing from University College Dublin and was fiction editor for the inaugural issue of the literary and art journal Profiles.
All Them Dogs follows Tony Ward, who returns to Dublin after five years in exile in England, hoping to rebuild his place in the city’s criminal underworld after murdering a rival gang member. When he begins working for Flute Walsh, the enforcer of a local crime boss and a boy from his past, Tony finds himself drawn to him in ways he never expected. It is now available from Riverhead.
Continue reading “Read an Excerpt from All Them Dogs by Djamel White”
I love the depth multiple POV novels offer. Multiple perspectives allow us to see characters from different angles, complicating our idea of who they really are. While I appreciate a voicey first-person narrator, and know they’re a popular trend (I don’t have stats to back this up, but I’m sure a high percentage of contemporary novels are written in first-person), multiple POVs can widen the scope of the narrative, allowing the reader to know information one character has that another doesn’t, which adds delicious story tension. And multiple perspectives can bring extra richness, texture, and nuance to stories.
I’ll make another claim I can’t back up with hard data: multiple POV novels can be more difficult to query and sell. That was the case for my debut, How We See the Gray, which includes nine (yes, nine) perspectives. So for the querying writers out there—or just anyone hungry for beautiful, nuanced stories—I put together a list of some of my favorite multiple POV novels from the past few years… and they all happen to be debuts!
Continue reading “Ten Debut Multiple POV Novels Recommended by Rachel León”
Hillary Berhman‘s debut short story collection, Lake Effect, was selected by Lauren Groff as the winner of the 2024 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. In it, characters move through wild landscapes and emotionally fraught relationships as they struggle with isolation, longing, and the complicated ways people try to care for one another. Spanning settings from Seattle to Istanbul, these stories explore intimacy, family, labor, and dislocation in lives shaped as much by emotional distance as by fierce human connection.
We asked Berhman to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her writing.
Continue reading “Lake Effect author Hillary Behrman has too many book recs to count”
Chitra’s mind is in Kolkata, India, where she has a house she lovingly built with her late husband. But her physical body is stuck in a power wheelchair — in an assisted living facility in Columbus, Ohio. Because of this, Chitra is in a terrible mood most days. Rajendrani Mukhopadhyay’s debut novel, Chitra Demands to Go Home (out now from Modern Artist Press), follows the 75-year-old Bengali widow as she navigates her new existence after suffering a stroke.
Chitra, it seems, will stop at nothing to leave this place she refuses to call home.
This is a story with many themes: cross-cultural tensions, a mother’s immovable expectations for her adult children, friendship, and late-in-life identity. Readers can also expect plenty of humor thanks to the novel’s cantankerous main character. Mukhopadhyay herself was trained as a scientist and has spent much of her career in science communications. But for her book, she was largely inspired by her personal observations as a third culture kid who has lived in India, Kuwait, and Canada. We spoke with Mukhopadhyay about the demanding and difficult Chitra, humor’s role in this bittersweet, and much more.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarification.
Continue reading “Rajendrani Mukhopadhyay on Cross-Cultural Tensions in Chitra Demands to Go Home”
Kerri Schlottman is the author of Daytime Moon and Tell Me One Thing. In Daytime Moon, readers meet Isa, an adrift woman who has a gift of premonition and a knack for tarot.
We asked Schlottman to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her writing.
Continue reading “Kerri Schlottman, author of Daytime Moon, learned to read from Are You My Mother”
What does it cost a family to cross an ocean — and who pays the price for generations to come? That is the quietly devastating question at the heart of Davin Malasarn’s debut novel The Outer Country.
The story begins in Thailand, where two sisters have their lives irrevocably split when their parents make the agonizing decision to send only one daughter to America — the foreign land the family calls “the outer country.” When the choice defies expectation, a wound opens between the sisters that time and distance only deepens.
Years later, one sister’s young son, Ben, becomes the center of the family’s unspoken tensions. When signs of gender nonconformity surface in him, a fateful decision is made that will cast a long shadow over his childhood — and set in motion a story about inheritance, silence, and the slow, difficult work of self-becoming. As Ben grows, he must navigate his queer identity, fractured family relationships, and the weight of a past that no one wants to name, moving between Thailand and Los Angeles and eventually to Stanford.
The Outer Country is a book about what we inherit, what we survive, and what it takes to finally tell the truth.
Continue reading “Inside The Outer Country: Davin Malasarn on Immigration, Queerness, Family, and the Limits of Belonging”
The Younger and Other Stories, the debut short story collection by Daniel J. O’Malley, gathers haunting stories that trace the moments when ordinary life begins to drift into the uncanny, when circumstances shift, reality dissolves, and the familiar world reveals itself to be far stranger than it first appeared. By turns tender and unsettling, the collection explores the unstable spaces between connection, consequence, and uncertainty in prose that is elemental, precise, and quietly unnerving.
The Younger and Other Stories will be published on April 13, 2027, by Hub City Press.
Daniel J. O’Malley’s fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, Granta, Subtropics, Alaska Quarterly Review, and The Best American Short Stories, among other publications, and has been featured on NPR’s Selected Shorts. He grew up in Missouri and currently lives in West Virginia, where he teaches at Marshall University.
Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of The Younger and Other Stories, which features art by Nancy Friedland, along with a Q&A with O’Malley about its creation.
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