Our first three categories this year are all measurement tools for the health of an industry, but of course they’re also sources of great enjoyment, and maybe none so much as this one: debut fiction. There’s a refreshing blank-page feel to debut work, even though most such works are the products of long, arduous striving to break into a hyper-competitive industry. Most debut authors have been writing for their entire lives, but even so, there’s an intake of fresh air when opening a first book. These authors haven’t had a chance to spoil their promise by attacking their readers or parading their bigotries on social media. They haven’t yet used their acceptance speech for a minor regional award to grate out an itemized list of the readers they don’t want (spoiler: you yourself will always be on that list). They haven’t yet referred to the small press debut of their unbearable The Mountain of My Misgivings as the Second Coming of the Messiah. Instead, all is new-fallen snow, full of promise. When dealing with debut fiction, of course, there are defects that are almost hard-wired into the enterprise. Coming-of-age stories are unavoidable, unfortunately. Topicality (and its most virulent variant, Twitter Topicality) tends to run rampant. And in the 21st century, grandstanding auto-fiction is the default rather than the exception. But even given these, there are superior examples. These were the best of them this year:

10 In Memoriam by Alice Winn (Knopf)

Winn here crafts a poignant gay love story out of the material of historical fiction, centering her story during the First World War and putting two young men at the crossroads of both the endless carnage of the front and their own conflicting desires for each other, and she tells this story in lovely, heartfelt prose.

9 Disturbance by Jenna Clarke (WW Norton)

In this story of a young woman who dabbles in the witchcraft of a new friend, readers will just have to work to overlook two obvious facts: a) that magic isn't real, and b) that Clarke clearly thinks it is. And there's ample reward: she crafts this story into something that often rises above the typical 21st-century anomie of contemporary fiction.

8 The God of Endings by Jacqueline Holland (Flatiron Books)

Holland's debut is about a young woman in the 19th century who becomes supernaturally immortal and faces a lifetime of both hiding her ageless nature and seeking the dark figure who's always been lurking at the edges of her life, and Holland infuses the whole narrative with a gracefully-worded energy.

7 Close to Home by Michael Magee (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Probably the most visceral of the year's debuts, Magee's novel tells the story of a lovable semi-literary loser growing up drunk and stoned and strung out in a brutish Belfast, and the whole thing is weirdly effective, full of dimwitted, self-destructive people surrounding the one kid who wants out.

6 Western Lane by Chetna Maroo (FSG)

Another perennial worry of debut fiction is that the author will subject the reader to some momentary (or, God forbid, lifelong) obsession – take, for instance, Chetna Maroo's novel, which is not only a coming-of-age story but also just crammed to its hairline with everything you never wanted to know about squash. But Maroo often manages to widen the focus, thankfully.

5 The All-American by Joe Milan (WW Norton)

In another coming-of-age story, Milan writes the narrative of teenager Bucky Yi, who's living in Washington State and dreaming of being a college football star when suddenly Twitter strikes – er, that is, suddenly the government capriciously decides to deport him to South Korea, where he hasn't been since he was a child. The resulting story is often very touching, again rising above its hot-button call-signs.

4 The Weight by Jeff Boyd (Simon & Schuster)

In yet another coming-of-age novel chock-a-block with autofiction, Boyd creates the story of a black musician in Portland and follows him through the experiences of young adulthood, and Boyd both fills the whole thing with lyric heart but also works in a surprisingly taut plot-driven thread.

3 The Road to Dalton by Shannon Bowring (Europa Editions)

Bowring's charming debut is the year's most successful small-town novel, filling out a cast of relatable characters in 1990 rural Maine and going about her business with a clear prose line and a remarkably condescension-free empathy that makes for mostly comforting although sometimes jarring reading.

2 Swim Home to the Vanished by Brendan Shay Basham (Harper)

Basham's debut follows a grieving young man into a Diné fishing village, which allows the author to dump a large amount of ethnographic information and sometimes tempts him to the braying sanctimony that would entirely fill this kind of book in less talented hands. Instead, he makes it all an involving and surprisingly fun reading.

1 Ghost Season by Fatin Abbas (WW Norton)

The political, social, and even ecological chaos of Sudan is at the heart of this, the year's best work of debut fiction. That chaos draws together the book's five main characters, and Fatin Abbas treats them all as separate universes of sympathy and complexity. The result is a brutal wonder of a debut.