Super Furry Animals singer Gruff Rhys's travelogue American Interior is one of 11 stellar debuts longlisted for this year's Guardian first book award, from the neurosurgeon Henry Marsh's incisive memoir of brain surgery to Sarah Perry's highly-praised first novel After Me Comes the Flood.

Boasting one of the longest subtitles crammed onto a book jacket so far this year – "The quixotic journey of John Evans, his search for a lost tribe and how, fuelled by fantasy and (possibly) booze, he accidentally annexed a third of North America" – Rhys's account of his journey in the footsteps of a farmhand from Snowdonia, who travelled to America at the tail end of the 18th century in search of a fabled tribe of Welsh-speaking native Americans, is one of five non-fiction titles longlisted for this year's Guardian prize. American Interior is selected alongside the artist Marion Coutts's devsatating account of the last years of her husband, Tom Lubbock, the art critic, who was diagnosed with a brain tumour in 2008.

"On Tuesday, Tom goes to sleep," writes Coutts, in The Iceberg, a memoir described as "miraculous" in its Guardian review. "His breathing is natural and ordered. His face relaxed. When watched closely like this, watched out as if your own life depended on it, death is normal. It is a series of stages more or less known. Here is a person asleep who will not wake. His breathing is not unstable. One. Two. One. Two. I pat the belly curve and trace the angle of its rising that I know so well. I love being in position here. It is perfectly correct. This is where I should be. But I want him to stay with me. Stay, just stay awhile longer."

"Every year I seem to say it has been very difficult to make a final decision and this year it seems to have been harder than ever, as there were a couple of titles we were very sorry to lose. But the standard was just so high," said Guardian Review editor Lisa Allardice, who will chair the judging panel. "The books are all compelling, illuminating dissections – literally in the case of neurosurgeon Henry Marsh – of interior or exterior worlds, and range geographically from County Mayo to New South Wales, from Afghanistan to China."

Evan Osnos's investigation of modern China through its citizens, Age of Ambition, Tom Wilkinson's exploration of architecture, Bricks and Mortals, and Marsh's memoir, Do No Harm complete this year's non-fiction. The rest of the slots on the longlist for a prize awarded to the year's best debut in any genre are devoted to fiction, with four novels and two collections of short stories, including Irish writer Colin Barrett's Young Skins. Already the winner of the €25,000 Frank O'Connor award, Barrett's debut depicts the lives of the young in a small Irish town. "How dare a debut writer be this good?" said O'Connor judge Alison MacLeod of the collection.

Sarah Perry was picked for her debut novel After Me Comes the Flood, in which a man discovers a mysterious house during a heatwave, where the inhabitants appear to be expecting him. Matthew Thomas makes the cut for We Are Not Ourselves, about a marriage hit by Alzheimer's which netted him over $1m (£600,000) from an American publisher, and Fiona McFarlane for The Night Guest, in which a carer works her way into the life of an isolated old woman. Zia Haider Rahman was longlisted for his novel In the Light of What We Know, in which an investment banker's life is disrupted by the appearance of an old friend.

The final title on the longlist is May-Lan Tan's Things to Make and Break, a short story collection chosen from nominations put forward by Guardian readers.

The debuts, said Allardice, "deal with urgent contemporary topics - the rise of Alzheimer's, terrorism - and universal themes of love, loss and mortality". "Some of them are incredibly sad, all are enriching in some way. I look forward to seeing what the reading groups and the judges make of them," she said.

The judging panel will feature novelist Anne Enright, writer Mary Beard, MP Tristram Hunt and psychotherapist Josh Cohen, with the winner of the £10,000 award due to be announced at the end of November. A parallel judging process will also be led by Waterstones reading groups, whose verdicts will feed into the final decision. Former winners of the Guardian first book award include Zadie Smith, Alexander Masters and Kevin Powers.

The longlist in full

Readers' choice

Things to Make and Break by May-Lan Tan (CB editions)

Fiction

Young Skins by Colin Barrett (Jonathan Cape)

In the Light of What we Know by Zia Haider Rahman (Picador)

The Night Guest by Fiona McFarlane (Sceptre)

After Me Comes the Flood by Sarah Perry (Serpent's Tail)

We Are Not Ourselves by Matthew Thomas (4th Estate)

Non-fiction

The Iceberg by Marion Coutts (Atlantic)

Bricks and Mortals by Tom Wilkinson (Bloomsbury)

Age of Ambition by Evan Osnos (Bodley Head)

Do No Harm by Henry Marsh (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

American Interior by Gruff Rhys (Hamish Hamilton)