Meet the 10 best new novelists for 2024

Elizabeth O’Connor

Elizabeth O’Connor wrote Whale Fall in a cafe – but not, as you might expect, tapping on a laptop, nursing a coffee: she scribbled it on receipts and food order slips, while working in the kitchen. Set far from any cafe, in an isolated island community off the coast of Wales, on the eve of the second world war, it’s an exquisite, evocative coming-of-age story that takes place in a world on the cusp of great change.

Colin Barrett

Colin Barrett, 41, is the odd one out on this list: his debut novel, Wild Houses – a dark comedy about a gangland kidnapping in rural Ireland – is actually his third book, but that didn’t make it any easier to write.

Set over three days and 200 pages, it took him eight years and always felt, he says, “a first-time effort”.

Elle Machray

Elle Machray’s enthralling debut came to life in an unconventional way. They were on the sofa with their partner playing a game of “what if” and landed on the idea – “what if someone tried to recreate the gunpowder plot?” After finishing the first draft within three months, a friend messaged them out of the blue and suggested that they enter a pitch competition on Twitter (now X) for writers in Scotland. “I sent my pitch out. The tweet was liked by a couple of agents, and also by HarperNorth. So I sent them my first three chapters and they offered me a contract.”

Nicolas Padamsee

A politically engaged, urgently plotted coming-of-age thriller with a wicked satirical streak, England Is Mine – the debut novel by Essex-raised writer Nicolas Padamsee – digs into the grim world of online neo-nazism via the story of David, an Anglo-Iranian A-level student and music lover at odds with his right-on peers over his loyalty to a Morrissey-ish singer-songwriter, cancelled after a bigoted rant.

Kaliane Bradley

Kaliane Bradley, 35, studied English literature at university and graduated to work in publishing, but it was seeing Punchdrunk’s immersive theatre production The Drowned Man that made her want to write. “It was such a beautiful experience I thought: God, if I can’t create something, what’s the point?” she recalls.

Over the course of a decade, she found some success with individual short stories but four finished novels went nowhere. Then, cooped up indoors during Covid lockdowns, she visited a Wiki fan page for Ridley Scott’s The Terror, a TV drama she’d started watching, becoming enthralled by a minor character, the doomed Victorian polar explorer Graham Gore.

Leo Vardiashvili

“War trumps most things,” Leo Vardiashvili observes early on in his poignant and often painfully comic novel about the effect of violence and conflict on those who must live through them.

Andrés N Ordorica

Andrés N Ordorica’s book How We Named the Stars takes a familiar genre – the campus novel – and joyfully updates it for the 21st century.

For Lamont, 41, wrote the book in a year, beginning in autumn 2021 after the rejection of two prior manuscripts, a long and dispiriting process that ultimately proved clarifying when sympathetic editors told him that, in a novel, his storytelling worked best when it was furthest from his reporting persona.

Harriet Constable

Back in 2019, the London-based journalist and documentary-maker Harriet Constable was reading and stumbled upon a reference to orphaned girls who were taught music by Antonio Vivaldi at Venice’s Ospedale della Pietà. Digging deeper, she encountered the maestro’s star pupil, a violinist named Anna Maria, whom he had in mind as the soloist for numerous concertos including, it’s been suggested, The Four Seasons.

Amy Twigg

Growing up in the Kent Downs, Amy Twigg developed a taste for eerie tales. “There was a big history of witchcraft, and that’s really stuck with me,” she says. The county provides the setting for her lyrical, perceptive first novel, Spoilt Creatures, which takes its title from a letter between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West and won the 2021 BPA pitch prize.

Twigg, 33, is now based in Guildford, where she works as a freelance copywriter. After taking the Curtis Brown Creative novel-writing course, she started writing during the pandemic against a backdrop of hostility against women: the overturning of Roe v Wade, violence against transgender people.

Tom Lamont

You might already know the Guardian and Observer journalist Tom Lamont for his long reads on diverse topics from fish and chip shops to vending machines and Nazi hunters, but before the day job kicks in – before his second morning coffee – he’s also been writing fiction. His debut novel, Going Home, is a meltingly warm comedy centred on two old school pals recently turned 30: Téo, a road safety instructor, and Ben, a pill-guzzling, pec-flexing casino owner.