Reading path
Debut Novels
First novels that announced their authors to the world. Some arrived quietly and grew into legends over decades. Others detonated on contact and nothing was the same afterward. There is something electric about a debut: a writer with everything to prove and nothing to lose, swinging for the fences with a recklessness that more seasoned work can never quite recapture. Every book on this path carries that energy, that hunger, that feeling of a voice discovering itself for the first time.
In the app a path keeps your place, marks what you have read, and hands you the next work when you are ready for it.
The first button needs the app on this device; the second gets it there.
The route
- 1. FrankensteinMary Shelley, 1818
- 2. Things Fall ApartChinua Achebe, 1958
- 3. The Catcher in the RyeJ.D. Salinger, 1951
- 4. Native SonRichard Wright, 1940
- 5. NauseaJean-Paul Sartre, 1938
- 6. HungerKnut Hamsun, 1890
- 7. Invisible ManRalph Ellison, 1952
- 8. The StrangerAlbert Camus, 1942
- 9. Confessions of a MaskYukio Mishima, 1949
- 10. The Bell JarSylvia Plath, 1963
- 11. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young ManJames Joyce, 1916
- 12. The Heart Is a Lonely HunterCarson McCullers, 1940
- 13. HousekeepingMarilynne Robinson, 1980
- 14. Go Tell It on the MountainJames Baldwin, 1953
- 15. Pedro PáramoJuan Rulfo, 1955
- 16. Journey to the End of the NightLouis-Ferdinand Céline, 1932
- 17. A Tree Grows in BrooklynBetty Smith, 1943
- 18. A Voyage To ArcturusDavid Lindsay, 1920
- 19. Sister CarrieTheodore Dreiser, 1900
- 20. VThomas Pynchon, 1963
- 21. Bonjour TristesseFrancoise Sagan, 1954
- 22. Boys AlivePier Paolo Pasolini, 1955
- 23. I Capture the CastleDodie Smith, 1948
- 24. To Kill a MockingbirdHarper Lee, 1960
- 25. Burmese DaysGeorge Orwell, 1934
- 26. Call It SleepHenry Roth, 1934
- 27. The Naked and the DeadNorman Mailer, 1948
- 28. Watership DownRichard Adams, 1972
- 29. White TeethZadie Smith, 2000
- 30. Appointment in SamarraJohn O'Hara, 1934
- 31. Young LoniganJames T. Farrell, 1932
- 32. From Here to EternityJames Jones, 1951
- 33. A High Wind in JamaicaRichard Hughes, 1929
- 34. Under the NetIris Murdoch, 1954
- 35. Agnes GreyAnne Brontë, 1847
- 36. Mary BartonElizabeth Gaskell, 1848
- 37. WaverleySir Walter Scott, 1814
- 38. Where Angels Fear to TreadE.M. Forster, 1905
- 39. ChildhoodLeo Tolstoy, 1852
- 40. ZastrozziPercy Bysshe Shelley, 1810
- 41. The Mysterious Affair at StylesAgatha Christie, 1920
- 42. The Red RoomAugust Strindberg, 1879
- 43. TrainspottingIrvine Welsh, 1993