Since 1990, the booksellers who sit on our Discover Great New Writers selection committee have been on the hunt to find the best and the brightest, the next great storyteller (fiction or nonfiction) that they can’t stop talking about, the books that they can’t wait to get into the hands of another reader. Male and female; twenty-something, and (shall we say) something-more-than-twenty-something; based in cities and suburbs across the country, these booksellers review roughly 1,000 submissions each year from publishers of all sizes, and from that pool, select roughly 50 to feature in the Discover Great New Writers program. Our archive of previous Discover Great New Writers selections is here, and the archive of Discover Award winners here. Discover’s archive on the B&N Review is here.
Our booksellers have found our first 22 picks for 2017, and we can’t wait until January to share them with you. Look for more on all of these extraordinary books on The B&N Review in the coming weeks.
Kayla Ray Whitaker The Animators: A Novel
Katherine Arden The Bear and the Nightingale: A Novel
Thi Bui The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir
Natalie C. Anderson City of Saints & Thieves
Caite Dolan-Leach Dead Letters
Michael Farris Smith Desperation Road
Leah Carroll Down City: A Daughter’s Story of Love, Memory, and Murder
Vivek Shanbhag Ghachar Ghochar
John Freeman Gill The Gargoyle Hunters
Emily Fridlund History of Wolves
Melissa Fleming A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea
Emily Ruskovich Idaho: A Novel
Kristen Radtke Imagine Wanting Only This
Jason Rekulak The Impossible Fortress
Bill Hayes Insomniac City
Julie Buntin Marlena: A Novel
Lindsey Lee Johnson The Most Dangerous Place on Earth
Stephanie Powell Watts No One Is Coming to Save Us
Rebecca Schuman Schadenfreude: A Love Story
Patty Yumi Cottrell Sorry to Disrupt the Peace
Shannon Leone Fowler Traveling with Ghosts: A Memoir
Tom McAllister The Young Widower’s Handbook: A Novel
