Penguin debut novelists Catherine Airey, William Rayfet Hunter, Chris Chibnall, Claire Lynch and Emma Nanami Strenner.<br>
Two Harvard dropouts found a billion-dollar start-up that threatens to ruin them; a man falls in love in a sun-drenched French château ; a Hollywood starlet blurs boundaries with her therapist. These are just a handful of the standout stories being published in 2025, penned by a fresh cohort of debut novelists.
Spanning romance, crime, literary fiction, and sometimes a combination of all three, these are the stories we can’t stop thinking about – the ones we’ve been speeding through, swapping, and urging each other to read in the Penguin office. Below, we get to know the 13 debut authors, as they share their real-life inspirations and literary influences, and shed new light on the fiction titles we predict will be among the best books of 2025 .
Crime and mystery novels
From left to right: Sash Bischoff, Kelly Mullen and Chris Chibnall.<br><a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/459018/sweet-fury-by-bischoff-sash/9780857505262"></a>
A Hollywood starlet sees a therapist in preparation for her role in F. Scott Fitzgerald ’s Tender is the Night Author Sash Bischoff credits her career as a theatre director for her “intimate understanding of pacing and tension”, and the stakes certainly feel high throughout.
A fellow writer suggested Bischoff incorporate Tender is the Night into her novel. “The deeper I dug, the more I realised that Sweet Fury should be in conversation not just with Tender Is the Night , but with Fitzgerald’s body of work as a whole,” she says. The novel is also in conversation with the #MeToo movement, but Bischoff wanted to “avoid telling a story that felt black and white.” As a result, the characters “live in the grey area,” with thought-provoking results.
Read if you like: Promising Young Woman ; Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn; The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid.
A two-week stay at her grandmother’s house during the pandemic sparked the idea for Kelly Mullen's debut novel: a crime-fighting grandmother-granddaughter duo. “I wanted to capture a family dynamic that was based in conflict but also deep love,” Mullen explains. “The line ‘we aren’t a hugging family’ is borrowed directly from my grandmother.”
This fun and twisty murder mystery revolves around 77-year-old martini-drinking Mimi, who loves nothing more than settling down to an episode of Poirot , and her granddaughter Addie, who has just left her manipulative ex-fiancé. Together, they attend a swanky party in an old mansion where, during the festivities, their host is found dead. As the evening progresses and a second body turns up, it becomes a race against time for Mimi and Addie to find the killer in a house that contains as many secrets as people.
Chris Chibnall already has an impressive list of writing credits to his name, including Broadchurch , Doctor Who and the upcoming Netflix adaptation of Agatha Christie’s The Seven Dials Mystery . But Death at the White Hart is his first novel. Set in a small Dorset village, this mystery opens with the gruesome discovery of the body of the landlord of the White Hart pub. It is up to Detective Nicola Bridge to uncover the secrets of this close-knit community and capture the killer.
“I feel like I'm always trying to reflect real people’s lives,” Chibnall says of the book’s inspiration. “I think at the centre of Death at the White Heart is the idea of the pub as a symbol of a British way of life which is now disappearing fast. Using a village pub as the crucible for a murder mystery gave me the chance to examine [that].”
Read if you like: Broadchurch , Agatha Christie, small-town murder mysteries.
Literary love stories
Austin Taylor is no stranger to the pressure cooker environment of higher education, having graduated from Harvard University in 2021 with a degree in Chemistry and English. “It feels like every failure is the end of your world,” she says, “and every success could fling you into the land of your dreams. It’s no wonder sometimes these kids break.”
This experience partly inspired Notes on Infinity , a high-stakes love story that follows two Harvard students from different backgrounds who drop out to create a billion-dollar tech start-up. But as their ambition and careers reach dizzying heights, their relationship is pushed to the limits.
Taylor also wanted to write about being a woman in STEM, and was influenced by the gendered commentary around Elizabeth Holmes – the “incredibly public rise in which you are celebrated for being a woman in a very male space […] and then to have the thing you’d been lauded for turned against you as you fell.”
“It started with a building,” says journalist and fashion critic Charlie Porter of the inspiration for his first work of fiction. Specifically, it started when he saw a new-build block of flats overshadowing a council block, and wondered about the lives of those inside. “I have queer friends a couple of generations older than me who, in the early 80s, were moved out of squats into what were then undesirable council flats. I realised I could use this to explore queer counterculture and alternative ways of living that were all but wiped out by the AIDS crisis.”
The result, Nova Scotia House , sees protagonist Johnny reflect on his late partner Jerry, some 25 years his senior, and his stories of the radical culture of queer community, resistance and joy that preceded the AIDS crisis. Still living in the flat they shared together, Johnny sets out to restore a way of life that risks being lost forever.
When a young man agrees to join his university friend at her French summer home, he is introduced to a strange new world of privilege and her beguiling family – including her handsome brother Felix. But as post-summer life resumes in London, the protagonist's lust for Felix blossoms into a relationship that will be tested by their insecurities and differences.
William Rayfet Hunter was an NHS junior doctor of six years before they scooped the #Merky Books New Writers' Prize in 2022, initially writing their first draft between hospital shifts. More than just a sultry summer read, their debut novel is a deft and unflinching exploration of class, wealth and race, and how these power dynamics bear out in personal relationships. “I wanted to write a love story that goes beyond the sunset and the happily-ever-after, peeling back the illusions we cast onto others,” Hunter says.
In a small village in 1990s England, teenager James dreams of a life beyond the quiet loneliness that fill his days. Then along comes Luke, a confident and handsome newcomer. As the seasons pass and the two boys forge a close, life-changing bond, James becomes increasingly infatuated with Luke – and questions whether his love really is unrequited.
Poet Seán Hewitt decided to write his debut novel about first loves because of their lingering impact on adulthood. “[W]ith most of the queer people I spoke to (and most non-queer people too), that experience of first love was furtive, unreciprocated, imagined, self-contained, all-consuming. The question for me was, what do we get out of that sort of love? And how could I write a novel that does justice to what love does to our imaginations?”
Stories of friendship and family From left to right: Colwill Brown, Claire Lynch and Emma Nanami Strenner.<br><a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/460689/we-pretty-pieces-of-flesh-by-brown-colwill/9781784745578"></a>
Colwill Brown grew up in Doncaster in the late '90s, but her debut novel about three teenage girls in the same area is far from autobiographical. “I fell in with the alternative kids and was able to let go of the pressure to be a certain kind of Donny lass,” Brown says of her book’s inspiration. “But what if I hadn’t?” Enter: Kel, Shaz and Rach.
The three girls love each other fiercely, but this bond is tested by fights on nights out, the cruelty of teenage boys and the way their lives splinter in different directions. Each chapter feels like a self-contained short story, which is how Brown initially wrote the novel, and the intimate storytelling (told entirely in a West Yorkshire dialect) puts you in the head of each character. By the end of the novel, Kel, Shaz and Rach will feel like old friends – and you’ll be sad to let them go.
For 40 years, it’s been Maggie and her father Heron against the world. Their close bond was forged after Dawn, her mother, left when Maggie was still a young child. But when Heron receives an earth-shattering diagnosis, the truth behind Dawn’s absence begins to emerge and threatens to tear the father and daughter apart.
Academic Claire Lynch visited archives to research her debut novel, unearthing a lesser-known chapter of LGBTQI+ history in 1980s Britain. “People often connect this decade to the AIDS crisis or Section 28, but here was this whole aspect of history I was ashamed to say I knew nothing about,” she says.
The result is a story that is at once tender, heartbreaking, and staggering in its damning reflection of all-too-recent social attitudes.
Read if you like: short, compulsively readable novels; family stories and secrets; Deborah Levy.
Opening in an airport, My Other Heart takes you on a journey to discover the meaning of belonging and home. “I realised that through my time living in different countries, I became more and more aware of that dichotomy between where one is ‘from’ and where you feel you ‘belong’,” says Emma Nanami Strenner of the book’s inspiration.
The three women at the heart of this story, Mimi, Kit and Sabrina, are on a quest to discover their past, to uncover the truth of their identities and to reunite with the parts of themselves that have been taken or lost.
Taking inspiration from the skilful observations and empathetic characters of Elizabeth Strout, My Other Heart is a tender and moving exploration of race, class and family.
Thought-provoking reads From left to right: Catherine Airey, Fiza Saeed McLynn and Lisa Ridzén.
In the aftermath of 9/11, Cora Brady finds herself suddenly orphaned as her father is among the thousands of missing people who went to work in the Twin Towers and didn’t come home. In the midst of her grief, Cora receives a letter from an estranged aunt who offers her a home in her parents' childhood town in Ireland. What follows is a sweeping account of Cora’s family and the life-changing events that have shaped their lives.
Inspired by the novels that author Catherine Airey loves to read – “big sweeping family sagas" and coming-of-age stories, such as Anna Karenina and I Capture the Castle – Confessions is an expansive exploration of human nature and family dynamics.
Read if you like: multi-generational storytelling; The Paper Palace
Working as a therapist for over 10 years, Fiza Saeed McLynn witnessed first-hand the many ways in which people experience and express grief, and this is at the heart of her novel.
Taking inspiration from authors such as Kazuo Ishiguro and Audrey Niffenegger, as well as world events such as the aftermath of World War I, Saeed McLynn has created an extraordinary and heartwarming novel of wonder, magical realism , mystery and history. Set in both 1900 Paris and 1920’s Chicago, we follow heroine Maisie from childhood into adulthood as she navigates the worlds of love and grief, internal conflicts and the mystery of the Midnight Carousel.
Written with compassion and prose that longs to be embraced, The Midnight Carousel is an accomplished and polished debut novel from an author who will be one to watch in 2025.
Read if you like: magical realism; The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter; books by Haruki Murakami .
Already a sensation in Sweden, When the Cranes Fly South tells the story of Bo as he confronts his mortality and the way he has lived his life. “The first seed of the idea for the book came to me when I found the notes from my grandfather’s care team,” says Ridzén. “I wanted to show how ageing forces a person into vulnerability.”
Bo, faced with the prospect of losing his beloved elkhound, and not having yet made amends with his son, is forced to reflect on the choices he has made, the things he has never said and the love he has never expressed.
Written with incredible detail and a humaneness that makes the reader question their own choices in life, When the Cranes Fly South is an assured and vulnerable look at the lives of those who may be running out of time.
Read if you like: books by Fredrik Backman ; The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce; The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson.
