The ten best debut novels of the decade

Emily Temple is a senior editor at Lit Hub. Her first novel, The Lightness, will be published by William Morrow in 2020.

Temple and the Literary Hub staff picked the ten best debut novels of the decade. One title on the list:

George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo (2017)

It is strange to think of George Saunders as a debut novelist, but after four story collections—including contemporary classics like Pastoralia and Tenth of December—2017’s Lincoln in the Bardo represented a true departure. Saunders has always been one of our funniest writers, which engenders in some critics a suspicion that he is unserious, that he is but the master of a simple trick, repeated again and again with great skill (we should all be so talented). These critics, of course, are wrong. Saunders is a morally serious writer who wields humor like a razor blade, bleeding the cut as needed, getting the reader from one round to the next, story after relentless story. Death, love, loneliness, joy, grief—these are the concerns of great art, and they are the concerns of George Saunders.

Lincoln in the Bardo was published three weeks after the inauguration of Donald Trump; it was a particularly grim February for a large swathe of Americans, as November’s shock settled into numbness, each day’s news somehow darker, more absurd, than the last. It was in this context I encountered the sly grace of Saunders novel, a prismatic tale of a father’s near-debilitating grief—the father in question, of course, is Abraham Lincoln, who lost his son Willie in the middle of the Civil War, and was seen to visit the boy’s grave at Georgetown’s Oak Hill Cemetery. It is there we enter the Bardo, that grayed-out middle space of Tibetan Buddhism in which the dead await rebirth, biding time till the next life beckons; if they’re lucky, they’ll find themselves in a George Saunders novel, mustered into a loose chorus of voices, coarse and tender, bawdy and elegiac, puzzling over the curious fixations of the living as they figure out what it means to be dead. –Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Read about another entry on the list.

Lincoln in the Bardo is among Louise Doughty's ten top ghost stories, Emily Temple's ten wonderful works of literary fantasy, and Kathy Bates's ten best books.

--Marshal Zeringue