Novel Undertakings: First Fiction 2011
By Natalie Danford
Jan 24, 2011 page: 1 | 2

The joyful sense of discovery derived from reading the work of a first-time author—both the excitement of encountering a voice for the first time and the promise of more great work to come—cannot be underestimated. Below, PW looks at 10 of this season's promising fictional debuts, each with the potential to thrill.

Spooky Story

Paul Elwork, the 38-year-old author of The Girl Who Would Speak for the Dead (Putnam/Amy Einhorn Books, Apr.), read Carl Sagan's Broca's Brain (Random House, 1979) when he was in high school and was intrigued by the story of the Fox sisters, who founded the "spiritualist movement" in the 19th century.

"They fooled so many people, even toured Europe, and became destitute (sort of like rock stars)," Elwork explains. "Years later, one of the sisters made a confession in front of a theater audience, even demonstrating how the trick was done. The true believers didn't accept the confession. All of this said a lot to me about how belief operates."

In Elwork's fictionalized version of the story, 13-year-old twins fake an ability to contact the spirit world in 1925, only to have death work its way into their lives.

Elwork began the novel in 1997, while still an undergraduate (he holds a bachelor's degree from Temple University and a Master's in English from Arcadia University). He worked on it "in starts and stops," he says, and published a novella focused on the same story with Casperian Books in Sacramento, Calif. Eventually, writer M.J. Rose introduced Elwork to Dan Lazar, who became his agent and showed the novella to Amy Einhorn, publisher of her eponymous imprint at Putnam.

Einhorn recalls, "It was a novella. But it was also damn good." She and Elwork worked together to expand the story, and the resulting work has earned blurbs from the likes of Scott Smith.

Angry Young Men

Ecco editorial director Lee Boudreaux says that Eleanor Henderson's Ten Thousand Saints (Ecco, June), set in the late 1980s, "takes the seminal elements of an era—the music, the graffiti, the social upheaval of gentrification, the opening salvos of the AIDS epidemic—and combines them with a handful of brilliantly conceived characters to tell a story of virtuosic ambition and grace." When Henderson's agent, Jim Rutman of Sterling Lord Literistic, submitted the manuscript, Boudreaux read it in one night and pre-empted it the following day.

Saints tells the story of Jude, who is raised by hippies in Vermont but later moves to New York City's East Village and becomes involved in the "straight-edge" movement, a punk rock movement that was staunchly against drugs, consumption of meat, and sex. Henderson will embark on an eight-city tour to promote the title.

The 31-year-old Henderson, who teaches writing at Ithaca College, says, "I couldn't have written this book without my husband, Aaron. Growing up, he spent a lot of time on St. Mark's Place in New York, where his mother lived for 25 years, and it was there that he first encountered the straight-edge hardcore scene in the late 1980s. His stories about that period and that place always appealed to me, and I knew that I wanted to capture them, to perform some kind of ethnography. It was the paradox of the subculture that fascinated me the most—teenage boys playing angry music and swearing off drugs?"

Curious Young Men

Stephen Kelman, author of Pigeon English (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, July) discovered an upside to unemployment. After being "made redundant" at a job in local government administration, the 34-year-old inhabitant of Luton (a town about 30 miles outside of London) took six months to write a first draft of his debut novel, about an 11-year-old Ghanaian immigrant in a London housing project who sets out to solve the murder of a classmate. Kelman signed on with agent Jo Unwin at Conville & Walsh, spent another six months editing the manuscript (losing 30,000 words along the way), and saw it sell in seven countries worldwide.

HMH senior editor Jenna Johnson, who acquired the novel and plans a 25,000-copy first printing, says, "Pigeon English is a one-sitting read, primarily because once the narrator's voice is in your ear you don't want to stop listening."

Kelman reports that he was inspired to write the novel because he was "deeply affected by the relentless stream of stories coming out of the British news media about young victims of violent crime, and concerned by their bleak portrayal of Britain's children, especially those in deprived urban areas. Having grown up in an environment very similar to what's in the book, I felt compelled not only to explore these issues from a more intimate perspective, but also to present the other side of the story, to show these characters' lives in a more positive, hopeful light."

From Screen to Page

Though The Homecoming of Samuel Lake (Random House, July) is Jenny Wingfield's first novel, she has plenty of screenwriting experience—on films including The Man in the Moon (starring Reese Witherspoon) and The Outsider (starring Naomi Watts). Wingfield is 65 and lives on a farm in East Texas.

Her process for writing the novel was decidedly unconventional. She wrote the first hundred pages in a couple of weeks, then set the manuscript aside for 12 years. Finally, at the urging of friends, she wrote the remaining 300 pages over the course of three months.

Wingfield, who rescues animals—she once saved a buzzard after it was hit by a car—initially intended to write a play that would be acted "on three sets in one—a house, sandwiched between two distinctly different businesses, so that a set change would only entail moving the lights."

The play morphed into a novel ("I still intend to write the play," Wingfield insists) about an Arkansas preacher whose rigid ideas about right and wrong are challenged when his 12-year-old daughter hides an eight-year-old neighbor from his abusive father.

Random House publisher Susan Kamil, who acquired the book from Susanna Einstein at LJK Literary Management, says, "Jenny's huge gifts as a storyteller, her ability to create characters that leap off the page, and her authentic, colorful voice combined to make her debut an unforgettable reading experience. Plus there is a young protagonist—Swan Lake (truth!)—who will lodge in readers' hearts forever."

From Stage to Page

Playwright Laura Harrington, 57, who teaches playwriting at MIT, has seen her work produced around the U.S., as well as in Canada and Europe. In 2008, she won a Kleban Award (funded by A Chorus Line writer and lyricist Edward Kleban) for most promising librettist in the American musical theater. The generous cash prize afforded Harrington two years of writing time.

Says Harrington, "I wanted to do something I'd never done before, reconnect to the creative process, and be a beginner again. So I decided I wanted to write a novel." Harrington says her process was simple: "I showed up every day and wrote."

The resulting novel, Alice Bliss (Viking/Pamela Dorman Books, June), is an expanded version of the story at the heart of Harrington's one-act, one-woman musical, Alice Unwrapped. The novel features a 15-year-old girl whose beloved father has deployed to Iraq.

"In the musical we could only really deal with one moment in Alice's life, but the character was so interesting and the material so rich that I knew there was a bigger story there," explains Harrington. The author's own father was a navigator/bombardier in WWII who suffered post-traumatic stress disorder after returning home, and both of her brothers were in the Air Force.

Dorman, who acquired the novel from Stephanie Cabot at the Gernert Company, tells PW, "I'm always looking for novels with heart—ones that have a deeply emotional core—and Alice Bliss has that in spades."

page: 1 | 2