# The 22 Greatest Debut Novels of the 2010s

> Everyone here was a first-timer, which makes the confidence on display a little unfair.

*By YPB Team · Published October 24, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/the-22-greatest-debut-novels-of-the-2010s*

---

## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **The Martian** — score 1000/1000
   Andy Weir's 2011 survival story of an astronaut stranded on Mars, solved one engineering problem at a time.
2. **The Night Circus** — score 809/1000
   Erin Morgenstern's 2011 fantasy of a black-and-white travelling circus and the rival magicians bound inside it.
3. **My Absolute Darling** — score 679/1000
   Gabriel Tallent's 2017 harrowing novel of a teenage girl and her abusive survivalist father in California.
4. **The Bear and the Nightingale** — score 624/1000
   Katherine Arden's 2017 Russian folklore fantasy about a girl who sees the household spirits.
5. **The Miseducation of Cameron Post** — score 560/1000
   Emily M. Danforth's 2012 novel about a teenager sent to a gay conversion camp in Montana.
6. **Gideon the Ninth** — score 560/1000
   Tamsyn Muir's 2019 'lesbian necromancers in space' mystery with a sword-wielding cavalier.
7. **Divergent** — score 485/1000
   Veronica Roth's 2011 dystopian YA novel about a society sorted into factions by temperament.
8. **Eileen** — score 485/1000
   Ottessa Moshfegh's 2015 dark, tense novel narrated by a young prison secretary in 1960s New England.
9. **The Rosie Project** — score 485/1000
   Graeme Simsion's 2013 romantic comedy of a geneticist who designs a questionnaire to find a wife.
10. **An Ember in the Ashes** — score 485/1000
   Sabaa Tahir's 2015 YA fantasy set in a brutal Roman-inspired empire.
11. **Lincoln in the Bardo** — score 485/1000
   George Saunders's 2017 first novel, a chorus of ghosts surrounding Abraham Lincoln's grief over his son.
12. **Behold the Dreamers** — score 397/1000
   Imbolo Mbue's 2016 story of Cameroonian immigrants chasing a better life in New York around the 2008 crash.
13. **Ready Player One** — score 397/1000
   Ernest Cline's 2011 sci-fi quest through a virtual world stuffed with 1980s pop culture.
14. **The Poppy War** — score 397/1000
   R. F. Kuang's 2018 military fantasy drawing on 20th-century Chinese history.
15. **A Man Called Ove** — score 291/1000
   Fredrik Backman's 2012 warm, grumpy story of a widower whose plans are interrupted by his new neighbours.
16. **The Hate U Give** — score 291/1000
   Angie Thomas's 2017 YA novel about a teenager who witnesses a police shooting of her friend.
17. **Shadow and Bone** — score 291/1000
   Leigh Bardugo's 2012 Russian-inspired fantasy that launched the Grishaverse.
18. **Homegoing** — score 291/1000
   Yaa Gyasi's 2016 saga following two half-sisters' descendants across Ghana and America over 300 years.
19. **Everything I Never Told You** — score 291/1000
   Celeste Ng's 2014 family mystery after a teenage girl is found drowned in a lake.
20. **The Girls** — score 291/1000
   Emma Cline's 2016 coming-of-age novel inspired by a Manson-style California cult.
21. **There There** — score 0/1000
   Tommy Orange's 2018 polyphonic novel of Native Americans in Oakland converging on a powwow.
22. **The Sympathizer** — score 0/1000
   Viet Thanh Nguyen's Pulitzer-winning 2015 spy novel narrated by a Vietnamese double agent.

Tags: books, 2010s, fiction, debut novels