White Teeth by Zadie Smith A 25-year-old when fi rst published, Zadie Smith wrote her
her and for Salt. Whether she would make the shortlist was irrelevant (she did), getting on to the longlist was a massive achievement – especially for a fi rst novel from an unknown author – and a cast-iron guarantee of increased sales and raised profi le.
GOOD WORKS In my latest novel, cunningly – or confusingly – entitled First Novel despite it being my seventh, creative writing lecturer Paul Kinder, author of one novel published years earlier by an independent press, becomes obsessed with the idea that copies of his fi rst novel might reside on the shelves of famous writers featured in the Guardian’s Writers’ Rooms series. He pores over the photographs that accompany this feature, hoping for the sense of validation that
would accompany spotting his orange spine on the bookshelves of Martin Amis or Julian Barnes. Spotting an orange spine on Siri Hustvedt’s bookcase, Paul realises that while he’s read her husband Paul Auster’s work, he’s never read Hustvedt’s. He resolves to start with her fi rst novel, T e Blindfold. For many years, foolishly, I didn’t
First Novel by Nicholas Royle
Jonathan Cape HB Out now
read Hustvedt, but I did wonder if her work could be as good as Auster’s. His New York Trilogy is one of the great fi rst novels. But when I fi nally read T e Blindfold, I discovered it’s even better. It’s a sly, subtle novel that plays clever games with the reader in a less overt way than Auster’s metafi ction. T e ending makes you reassess everything and immediately return to the beginning – and it does so by the deliberate use of (of all things) a cliché. It could well be my all-time favourite fi rst novel.
debut novel while at university, and it sold half a million copies in its fi rst year. She has since published three novels, including last year’s NW, and moved to New York to teach creative writing at New York University.
Light a Penny Candle by Maeve Binchy In 1983, Binchy received a record advance of
£52,000 for her fi rst novel, which sold millions of copies worldwide. She went on to have 16 novels published, two of which were turned into fi lms.
The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks First published in 1984, The Wasp Factory is still fl ying off shelves,
and paved the way for Banks’ prolifi c career writing mainstream fi ction – and science fi ction under the Iain M. Banks moniker. His latest novel is The Hydrogen Sonata.