The start of a new year in the world of books invariably brings with it an avalanche of enthusiastically trumpeted first novels and 2015 is no exception. Over the next few months, all the major publishers have at least one fiction debut – some have two or three – that their publicity machines will be pushing as the Next Big Thing.

It is tempting in the face of hype about “dazzling” new voices (Faber on first-time author Alex Hourston) and “heart-stopping” narratives (Picador on newcomer Ryan Gattis) to be sceptical and turn instead to fiction’s old guard when deciding what to read. And it is true there are plenty of treats in store from established names such as Andrew O’Hagan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Anne Enright, Toni Morrison and Jonathan Franzen, who all have novels due this year. But to dismiss the annual fuss surrounding the new names in fiction as puffery would be a mistake – because among the spring deluge of first novels there are almost always a few real gems.

After all, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth was a debut. So too were The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon, Brick Lane by Monica Ali, Kathryn Stockett’s The Help and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, to name just a handful. To Kill a Mockingbird was Harper Lee’s first – and famously only – novel. And Catcher in the Rye was JD Salinger’s debut. Proof, if it were needed, that the first try at anything is sometimes the hardest to beat.

Last January, in our feature picking out the cream of 2014’s debut fiction, the Observer New Review introduced a clutch of superb new writers, some of whom went on to win prestigious literary awards and achieve the best fiction sales of 2014. Among them was Emma Healey, whose gripping debut, Elizabeth Is Missing, was showered with critical praise and has just won the Costa first novel award for 2014. Jessie Burton was there too. Her fine debut, The Miniaturist, became one of the year’s biggest-selling novels and ended 2014 being voted Waterstones book of the year. The paperback of The Miniaturist went straight to No 1 in the bestseller charts when it was released two weeks ago.

Zia Haider Rahman was another hugely impressive author on our list. His ambitious debut, In the Light of What We Know, was acclaimed by critics the world over, longlisted for the Guardian first book award and shortlisted for both the Goldsmith’s prize and the Edinburgh international book festival first book award.

This year, we’ve once again chosen the first-time novelists we believe will make a splash. As in 2014, they are a richly varied group. Their protagonists run the gamut from a window cleaner to a trafficked teenage girl and their literary influences range from Samuel Beckett to Alice Munro. Will they follow in Jessie Burton and Emma Healey’s footsteps? Let’s see…

JESSE ARMSTRONG

The Peep Show and In the Loop co-writer trawls the mid 90s for his comic debut novel following well-meaning Brits bringing theatre to wartorn Bosnia

Jesse Armstrong: ‘I like messes, they’re good to write about.’ Photograph: Sophia Evans/Observer

Jesse Armstrong, 43, is one of our hottest comedy writers. Best known for creating C4 sitcoms Peep Show and Fresh Meat (with comedy partner Sam Bain), he also co-wrote the first three series of the BBC political satire The Thick of It and the Oscar-nominated film In the Loop. With Chris Morris he wrote the 2010 terrorism satire Four Lions.

Now Armstrong is about to publish his first novel, Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals. It’s taken him two years of getting up early before his screenwriting commitments. “I’d always wanted to write a book. Sam and I actually met doing a creative writing course at Manchester.”

Set in 1994 (the year Tony Blair was elected Labour party leader), the novel focuses on a group of naive students who set off in a Ford Transit to take theatre to Bosnia to try to stop the war. It’s no surprise Armstrong is fascinated by the Blair years. But he wanted to take a wider look at recent British foreign policy. “That war was an incredibly pivotal moment for my generation, especially the political generation that were mature then. It seemed a moment when, after liberal intervention in Sierra Leone failed, or you had non-intervention in Rwanda, that intervention was regarded as good and necessary and wholesome, and lots on the left were calling for it in Bosnia, weren’t we? And I think that affected the mindset of lots of people when it came to Iraq. And I think it stopped lots of people seeing clearly, including myself.”

He travelled around the Balkan peninsula (“It was semi-method, I went by bus,” he jokes) and read up on the groups that turned up in Bosnia in the mid-1990s. “There were things like the Serious Road Trip and Susan Sontag doing Brecht in Sarajevo. Bono went, didn’t he?” he says with a chortle.

His dream was to craft a literary novel that was also a page-turner. “God knows, I love nice prose almost above anything else.” His literary heroes are John Updike and Lorrie Moore and he’s currently devouring the Edward St Aubyn trilogy.

“The one thing I did think when I was consciously starting to write was: don’t forget what you learned from scriptwriting. Don’t treat it as an indulgence where you can put aside narrative enjoyment, excitement, jokes and fun, and wank on about Bosnia for 300 pages.”

The novel’s narrator, Andrew, works on a building site and is appalled by the middle-class students on the trip. He pretends he can speak Croatian to try to sleep with the gorgeous playwright Penny.

“I guess I like messes, they’re good to write about. They’re funny and I feel sympathetic towards those feelings of ‘I want to be good’, ‘I want other people to notice I’m being good’ and ‘I want to hang around with other people who I like and maybe fancy’, and as a young person you can get into a big pickle.

“I think the same thing about politicians,” he continues. “I take a more benign view of them, especially on the left, than maybe is fashionable – lots of them go into it for the best of reasons, which doesn’t mean they might not be egotistical, vain, backstabbing, malicious and all the other things human beings can be…”

From Fresh Meat to the loser flatmates of Peep Show, Armstrong is good on young people trapped in a claustrophobic environment. Andrew is based on his own experiences in his 20s. “I come from the English side of the Welsh border and so does he, and I knew Manchester at the same period as the novel starts. I guess I’ve done what people do. You split yourself up into youthful characters that give you that spark.”

Was he a late starter? “I don’t think I’d conceptualised I was actually living my life until I was about 35!” Today he regards young people with a mix of admiration and awe. “My theory is you inoculate the awfulness of being young. It’s obviously great as well, but there’s something so painful and self-aware about it that, as you look at young people, you convince yourself they can’t possibly be feeling as out of things and wonky and angular and uncomfortable as I was. You assume: oh, they’ve probably got relationships sorted out and they’re probably having casual sex when they want to. But I suspect they haven’t figured it all out, have they?”

He’s clearly thrilled to be taken seriously as a novelist, though he laments that the characters of Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals – cool young black female playwright, nerdy politicos, comedy posh brother – won’t be brought to life by the likes of Zawe Ashton, Peter Capaldi and Robert Webb. But when I ask about a screenplay, there’s a glint in his eye. So watch this space. Liz Hoggard

Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals is published on 2 April by Random House, £12.99

JESSICA CORNWELL

John le Carré’s granddaughter on finally giving in to the urge to be a novelist and ending up with a trilogy to write

Jessica Cornwell: ‘For a long time I tried to carve out my own space.’ Photograph: Sophia Evans

Jessica Cornwell never intended to be a novelist; in fact, she had actively decided against it. Her first love was theatre, but while studying for a master’s in directing at the Institut del Teatre in Barcelona and working with an experimental Catalan theatre company, La Fura dels Baus, she became fascinated by the image that was to be the seed of her first novel, The Serpent Papers.

“I was working on a production of Titus Andronicus,” explains Cornwell, now 28, over tea in her local cafe in north London. “I spent a lot of time with the actress who played Lavinia and I became obsessed with that idea of the tongueless, handless woman who’s been robbed of the ability to communicate. Watching that scene being rehearsed over and over, it really got under my skin in a way that I found emotionally shocking. When I moved to London, right after I stopped working on that show, I kept returning to that image as something I wanted to explore.”

From that initial idea grew a complex and ambitious literary thriller that took her four years to plot and research – and that was just the first part, since The Serpent Papers is book one of a planned trilogy following her heroine, Anna Verco, a young academic and expert in rare books, on the trail of a lost manuscript and the truth about her own history. An ancient chapel in a Mallorcan monastery collapses, revealing a mysterious medieval book whose alchemical text links it to a series of grisly murders in Barcelona 10 years earlier, where the killer ritually slaughtered young women, leaving their mutilated bodies on public display. His signature was to cut out their tongues. As Anna collaborates with the retired detective who worked on the case, the evidence begins to suggest that the murderer may still be at large.

It may seem strange to have decided against becoming a writer at a young age, but perhaps not when you consider Cornwell’s literary pedigree. Her grandfather is David Cornwell, better known as John le Carré; her uncle the novelist Nick Harkaway; her father the screenwriter Stephen Cornwell. “I grew up with novels around me as a currency of expression and it seemed very normal,” she explains. “I used to fall asleep listening to my grandfather’s books on tape. I’m very proud of the role that he’s had in our family, he’s an amazing presence, but at the same time it is terrifying. There’s a very high standard of work and I’m conscious of that heritage – for a long time I actively tried to carve out my own space doing something different.”

She grew up in the rural, bohemian town of Ojai, California, the oldest of eight children, and still speaks with a soft west coast accent despite having spent most of her 20s in Europe and the UK. An interest in politics led her to study international relations at Stanford before switching to English literature and later pursuing research in India and Spain. When she moved to London she worked for a film company and a museum, stealing spare moments to write early pages of The Serpent Papers as the ideas began to crystallise. But her first brief research trip, to a monastery library in Mallorca, was the catalyst that convinced her she needed to give the novel her full attention; when she returned, she left her job and threw herself into immersive research while writing full time for six months until she had a rough draft.

Her first reader was not a member of her family, but a friend, who encouraged her to stick at it. (“Most of my family still haven’t read the book,” she says.) At that point she started following literary agents on Twitter, researching their lists, and eventually sent it to a handful.

“It was a terrifyingly solitary experience,” she recalls. “I’d had a fantastic job that I’d walked away from and writing is inherently full of rejection, no matter who you’re related to, so I was braced for that, and I did get my share of it.”

But after a six-figure auction at Frankfurt, The Serpent Papers has sold in seven countries and already been optioned for film. Meanwhile, Cornwell has accepted her destiny and is busy working on the second in the trilogy. “Despite veering as far away from it as possible,” she says, “I’ve ended up coming right back to my family roots. But I’m excited to have the opportunity to keep this story going.” Stephanie Merritt

The Serpent Papers is published on 29 January by Quercus, £14.99

LAURA BARNETT

The journalist’s first novel sees a young woman’s life fork into parallel narratives

Laura Barnett: ‘‘I had the space to be reflective, quiet and emotional.’ Photograph: Sophia Evans

“I can’t really remember a time when I wasn’t writing fiction,” Laura Barnett, journalist, theatre critic and now novelist, says. “I started when I was about five. My mum was a librarian and used to make me these little books – I guess I wanted to be published even then. I’d write on scraps of paper, she’d sew the binding, and I’d put really grandiose titles on the front.” Barnett was an only child, her mum a single mother, and in their flat in Clapham, they’d spend hours reading together.

I meet the writer on a sunny morning in winter at her publisher’s office. Barnett, 32, is all smiles – this is her first time being interviewed about her debut novel, The Versions of Us. As its title suggests, the book explores three versions of two people’s lives: Jim and Eva meet at university in Cambridge in 1958, and the seemingly small decisions they make in that moment create three very different futures for them, whether together or apart. “With the tripartite structure I felt I had the space to be reflective, quiet and emotional – all the things my favourite writers do,” Barnett explains, “because I didn’t have to worry massively about the plot: the natural momentum of the structure drew the characters through what was happening to them. That, for me, just made absolute sense. I’m not just making a Chinese box for the sake of being clever.”

The idea first came to Barnett at university, when she left for a year abroad (she studied Spanish and Italian). “I became very aware that there could have been another version of me who was staying in Cambridge, which got me thinking about the decisions we make that take us down another path. I thought about a book, but to be honest I was having quite a lot of fun in Rome, drinking cocktails and hanging out with unsuitable men so I didn’t go any further with it. I didn’t really think about it again until about 18 months ago.” It was getting married that reignited the idea. “When you make this pledge to someone for the long term, you find yourself thinking, ‘Gosh, how might my life have been different if we hadn’t met?’” It’s refreshing, though, I say to Barnett, to read a romantic story where a character is equally happy in different relationships: she hasn’t written about love in an idealised “The One” way. “I guess it does go against the grain of some romance stories,” she says. “But I hope for that reason it’s more real and closer to the way we actually live our lives – that’s the kind of fiction that really excites me.”

Thanks to its structure, Versions has drawn comparisons to One Day and Sliding Doors, but it is by no means “chick lit”. When her agent sent it round to publishers, “there was a real emotional connection from both men and women, which was really important to me,” Barnett says. The book was the subject of a fiercely contested six-publisher auction and has already had translation rights for 13 different languages; an extraordinary number for a debut novel.

Before writing the book, Barnett spent some time researching the various eras and cutting out photos from magazines of people who resembled her characters (Jim, for her, is absolutely Cillian Murphy). So it was an eerie surprise when she visited Cambridge recently and came face to face with an Eva lookalike: “I was stood in the spot on the Backs where Jim and Eva meet [when Eva crashes her bike], and it was funny, because a girl – a student, I’m sure – cycled past who looked a lot like Eva.” Her eyes widen. “My husband took a photo. It was kind of amazing.” Corinne Jones

The Versions of Us will be published by Orion in June, £12.99.

ALEX CHRISTOFI

The literary agent’s first outing explores notions of youth, identity and belonging in contemporary London

Alex Christofi: ‘It still feels a bit like someone’s broken into my laptop.’ Photograph: Sophia Evans

Alex Christofi is no stranger to the book world. At 27, he’s been a literary agent for six years, and while Glass may be his first published novel, it is not the first he’s written. “When I came out of university, I wrote an incredibly bad, pretentious novel,” he tells me, laughing. “The main character was called Alex and it was every clever idea I’d ever had.” This time round, however, Christofi decided to keep it simple. “I really wanted to just tell a yarn, a story that wasn’t about me, and find a character who first and foremost you want to be around.”

That character is Günter Glass, the book’s narrator and protagonist, a naive and totally endearing 22-year-old window cleaner who has just lost his mother and is left with the responsibility of financially supporting his father and brother. Living in Salisbury, where his escapades cleaning the cathedral have made him a minor local celebrity, Günter decides to take a job cleaning the windows of the Shard in London. In the capital, he meets a motley crew of characters: the Steppenwolf, his hermit housemate in Hackney; Lieve, a clairvoyant and Günter’s new love interest; and Blades, his unashamedly fascist new boss who also happens to be Lieve’s ex-husband. It’s a touching tale of young manhood in contemporary Britain seen from Günter’s unique perspective.

“We’ve got this grand tradition in British literature of antiheroes, people who don’t quite fit in, and they always seem to have one of four professions – I’ve never read a novel with a window cleaner in it,” says Christofi. “Sometimes, the number of middle-class characters in books gets a bit much, so I wanted to write somebody who was from a relatively working-class background who – God forbid – might have an inner life as well.”

Born in Dorset, Christofi grew up in a suburb of Bournemouth and attended a local comprehensive before going to Oxford to study English. Like Günter, whose mother is German, Christofi has a foreign parent too – his father is Cypriot – which, he explains, gave him something to compare British culture to, growing up: “Having one parent who doesn’t come from here makes you a bit more critical of things that other people might take for granted, and it also slightly places you on the outside.” In Glass, Günter experiences such outsider-ism head-on when filling out a tick-box ethnicity form on his first day working at the Shard (ticking “Other” and pondering the legality of the form’s discriminatory purpose) for his boss Blades.

Writing the book in 2010, with the recession in full swing, the author recalls how fascist sentiments were already bubbling under around Britain. “It was the BNP that people were talking about then, so Ukip doesn’t feature vaguely in the book, though you get the impression that Blades wouldn’t be unsympathetic to some of their claims,” he murmurs.

In his spare time, Christofi is already writing a second novel, this time set in France. As research, he recently stayed in the much-loved Parisian bookshop Shakespeare and Co as one of their “tumbleweeds” (authors who are offered short-term accommodation inside the shop in return for a couple of hours’ shopwork each day). “I slept in the nonfiction section on a bed that a press clipping from the 60s tells me Simone de Beauvoir had sex on!” he exclaims. It was a week that he clearly wishes could have lasted longer – “but I had to get back to work, the authors get antsy if you don’t reply for a while.”

As a literary agent, Christofi admits it felt a bit odd sending out his own manuscript to other agents. “I was really conscious that if I’d written something appallingly bad then word would get around quite quickly,” he says with a laugh. Thankfully, that wasn’t the case. Four years on from writing it, how does it feel to know Glass will be published? “It still feels a bit like someone’s broken into my laptop, but I’ll get used to it,” he smiles. Corinne Jones

Glass will be published in February by Serpent’s Tail, £12.99. Alex Christofi will be reading at the launch of Books in the Attic at Hackney Picturehouse on 26 Jan

EMMA HOOPER

The multi-talented musician/academic’s novel uses her grandparents as models and is shot through with magical realism

Emma Hooper: ‘There’s a lot of harsh realism out there. I wanted to write a book that had joy in it.’ Photograph: Sophia Evans

“I’m so ready to have this baby,” says Emma Hooper. “I got the book deal two years ago and I’d been writing for two years before that. It’s like a four-year-old child. I just want it to get out there already.”

Hooper is talking about her debut novel, Etta and Otto and Russell and James. It tells the story of Etta, an 82-year-old woman who one day decides to walk the 2,000 miles from her home in rural Canada to the sea, which she has never seen.

“I like the idea of taking small, small steps towards a large goal,” says Hooper. “And you experience a place very differently when you walk through it. This summer, I walked four miles to an airport, on a gravel road, carrying my suitcase.”

The book is partly a love song to Saskatchewan, a “vast expanse of big open skies and big open fields”. Born and raised in Alberta, Canada, Hooper moved to the UK in 2004. After a PhD in musico-literary studies, she now teaches at Bath Spa University (she is currently looking at what Disney princesses being sopranos means about representations of the female body).

Writing and academia aren’t the only strings to Hooper’s bow. She’s also a professional musician – she studied the viola from the age of three – plays in various bands, and has a solo project called Waitress for the Bees. She plays violin, accordion, glockenspiel, banjo and nose flute, as well as a 30in musical saw (called Mr Wentworth the Singing Saw) that sounds “like a spooky ghost, theremin-like”.

When she played in Finland in 2010, a “big head honcho” in the audience was so thrilled with her performance that she was awarded a Finnish cultural knighthood. “They take you to an underground ceremonial chamber, like a bunker, and they do the sword thing on your shoulders,” she giggles. “Then you drink from a horn full of special spiritual drink, which is some kind of alcohol, and then you’re a knight.”

Etta and Otto and Russell and James is Hooper’s third attempt at a novel and it took “years of sludging through”. But when Penguin Canada was sent the manuscript it took them only 12 hours to make an offer (“It was like Christmas, basically”) and it has attracted numerous six-figure foreign rights deals.

The main characters are loosely based on Hooper’s maternal grandparents: her grandmother was a schoolteacher and her grandfather grew up on a farm, one of 14 children. Like the titular Otto, his hair turned white all in one go when he went to war. This is a family trait brought on by stress: Hooper, 34, sports a single lock of white hair on the side of her fringe.

To go with her Amélie-style bob, she’s in a colourful jumble of patterns – red checkered shirt, polka-dot dress, indigo tights – and wears the look with ease. Between the ages of 14 and 24, she worked part-time as an assistant to a stage illusionist, playing “the freak” – a spider woman, a mermaid, a head without a body. During this stint she learned “how to let go of self-consciousness and just talk to people, relate to people regardless of how crazy I looked”.

A fan of Audrey Niffenegger and Alice Munro, Hooper’s sense of playfulness comes across in the book’s “gentle magical realism”. Etta befriends a coyote which she names James; her husband Otto fills the house with hundreds of increasingly fanciful papier-mache animals. “There’s a lot of harsh realism out there,” Hooper says. “I wanted to write a book that was optimistic and had joy in it. I definitely wanted joy.”

The story is told non-linearly, switching between characters and locations, and in several places events are left ambiguous. I turn the Dictaphone off so we can discuss our interpretations of the ending (they are slightly different), but the openness is part of the fun. “I’m a big fan of Roland Barthes and the death of the author,” she says. “It doesn’t matter what the writer thinks, all that matters is the reader’s interpretation. It’s what you read it as.” Kathryn Bromwich

Etta and Otto and Russell and James is published on 29 January by Fig Tree, £12.99





KATE HAMER

An image that came to the author unexpectedly led to her retelling the story of Little Red Riding Hood

Kate Hamer: ‘Everyone tells you it is almost impossible. You have to ignore that.’ Photograph: Sophia Evans

Once upon a time, an image came into Kate Hamer’s head – it arrived without warning: a little girl, in a red coat, lost in a wood. “My mission in the novel,” Kate says when I meet her at Faber’s offices, “was to find out why she was lost and who she was.” She wrote the first chapter in a single night “straight off”; it has stayed almost unchanged. It was only on completing her polished page-turner of a novel that she realised she had written about Little Red Riding Hood with a sinister new spin. The Girl in the Red Coat is about abduction and one way of judging its power is that it makes one feel the same helpless, rising rage that one sometimes experiences when hearing of crimes against children in real life.

Kate is a mother – her two children grown-up now – and believes the fear of losing a child is universal: “All parents have it, I certainly do.” But she has not, she says, read Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time (his unforgettable novel about losing a child).

She grew up in Pembrokeshire, her father an engineer who worked on the ferries at Fishguard, her mother a teacher. Their house was full of books. She read Alice in Wonderland and Grimm’s Fairy Tales and – over and over – a terrifying tale by Nicholas Fisk, Grinny, about a “grandmother who turns out to be an alien” (shades of Little Red Riding Hood again?).

Hamer is a combination of shy and confident: she talks with care. As a child, she wrote for pleasure – she wondered about writing for a living but did not try it right away. “I’ve gone round the houses with my career. For 10 years, I worked in television, producing documentaries.” Towards the end of this period, she studied for a creative writing MA at Aberystwyth University.

As a writer, you need “persistence; you need to stick to your vision. Everyone tells you it is almost impossible – you have to ignore that. You have to have blinkered vision because it is easy to get discouraged. You have to take on board that there are peaks and troughs and live with it.”

What she found most useful about the creative writing course was that it involved a “commitment”, a big step from having writing as a “little secret” you could keep to yourself, to opening yourself up to critical judgment. In 2011, she won the Rhys Davies short story competition and did a three-month course at the literary agency Curtis Brown, which was helpful: “I wanted to know more about how the publishing process worked. It can seem daunting and confusing from the outside. It was useful to demythologise it.” And it was Alice Lutyens at Curtis Brown who would eventually secure her two-book deal with Faber.

As a writer, Kate is a dreamer, with an active subconscious. “Writing feels really nice when you are not policing it.” Yet she does “lots of revision” because the first draft is written with “energy” – and at speed.

She lives in Cardiff – “the best city in Britain” – with a lively literary scene. She writes every day; her “golden period” is between 9.30am and 3.30pm. She walks every day too. “It puts your mind in a different place.” Plus, if a screen is your only horizon, you can lose perspective. Walking, she sometimes thinks: “The sky – my God, it is so high up! It is good to remind yourself there is a world outside.”

And does she have any tips to pass on about how to build suspense in a novel (something she does particularly well)? “Go with your instincts,” she says. “If you feel a sense of excitement, you are going along the right lines.” She adds that when novelists get stuck, it can be useful to write the story “as a poem, pare it down”. How would that work with The Girl in the Red Coat? She laughs: “It would be a scary poem.” Kate Kellaway

The Girl in the Red Coat is published on 5 March by Faber, £12.99

CLAIRE FULLER

The author took inspiration for her tale of a girl and her survivalist dad in the woods from a true hoaxer’s story from Germany

Claire Fuller: ‘I had to do a lot of research: I’d never skinned a squirrel before.’ Photograph: Sophia Evans

Claire Fuller’s route to writing was reassuringly – even inspiringly – far from the stereotype of the committed fictioneer who has spent every waking moment since the year dot scribbling away and dreaming of publication. Now 47, she didn’t begin to write until she was 40, and even then for a long time thought of it more as an interesting way to feed her creative urges than as a possible new career. And when Our Endless Numbered Days – a strikingly claustrophobic, tense story of a young girl spirited from her home to a hut in the woods by her survivalist father – had been taken on by Penguin, real life loomed large; on the weekend when offers from foreign publishers were flooding in, Fuller was busy getting married. “The whole thing was surreal,” she says with a smile now.

Not that this should make her sound remotely blase about her success; as we chat over a coffee, she comes across as thoroughly delighted, with an understandable mixture of excitement and apprehension about the book’s February publication. But she gives a strong sense of being determinedly level headed; the very first time she met her agent, Jane Finigan at Lutyens & Rubinstein, she and her fiance, Tim, sat on the train practising the questions that might face her.

One imaginary poser was about whether the book might be seen as a YA novel, a question that, in fact, nobody asked her. I can see why: despite its teenage narrator, Peggy, who spends much of the book recalling her eight-year-old self, the book is resolutely grown up. Where did the idea come from? It has its roots, Fuller explains, in the story of Robin van Helsum, the young Dutchman who in 2011 claimed that he had been living in the German forests for several years, only emerging when his father died. The “Forest Boy” turned out to be a runaway and the story a hoax – as Fuller says, “a sad story in itself. But it just made me think, what if it had been true? If he had lived in the woods with his father, what would have taken him there? What would have made his father take him there, what would have made them, or him, come out of those woods? And because I’m a girl, I wrote it from a girl’s point of view because I thought that was easier.”

Her decision to introduce a survivalist theme was partly pragmatic; as she points out, if Peggy and her dad managed to live in the wild for so long, they’d need to know how to stay alive beyond the first winter. That led to her beginning the story in the memorably baking summer of 1976: in the 70s, she explains, the survivalist movement had taken hold in the States and was beginning to spread here, where its adherents referred to themselves as “retreaters”.

Bottom line, then: could she do a Ray Mears if she had to? She laughs. “I spent a lot of time outside when I was growing up, with my father, who’s not a survivalist, in the woods, in the countryside, around my house, always in the garden, not really inside with my mum, outside with my dad. But I still had to do a lot of research; I had never skinned a squirrel before.” Has she now? No, she admits, she still hasn’t, but she has watched a lot of YouTube videos.

Fuller, who has lived in Winchester since she attended art school there, spent 23 years running a marketing business with her first husband, drawing and sculpting in her spare time. On a whim, she took part in NaNoWriMo, the national creative writing month (she produced a lot of material, but “it was so bad I threw it away”), then began to read her work at a local short story slam. Finally, she took the plunge and signed up for a creative writing MA at the University of Winchester. Now, she’s busy working away at her second novel, which is “definitely draft zero rather than draft one” and is not about survivalists. It is, as they say, all go. “The book’s being published by Penguin. I left my job. My son’s started university. My daughter turned 18. I’ve got married. Don’t they say you’re not meant to have three life changes at once!?” Alex Clark

Our Endless Numbered Days is published on 26 February by Penguin, £14.99

JAMES HANNAH

The author’s debut draws heavily on Samuel Beckett’s ideas and takes an anatomical approach to its hero’s life

James Hannah: ‘The fresh material comes minutes before I go to sleep.’ Photograph: Sophia Evans

The A–Z of You and Me may be James Hannah’s first published novel but he has actually been writing for over 20 years – and it shows. Not only does the book have a wonderfully quirky and contemporary plot, his writing itself has the accomplished feel of a far more experienced novelist.

Hannah began writing fiction while doing an MA in Beckett studies in the early 1990s at the University of Reading and the Irishman’s influence is evident in Hannah’s clever use of short, staccato sentences and deadpan dialogue. He acknowledges that the “I and You” structure of The A-Z of You and Me is directly drawn from Beckett: “I learned from him that you put the person who’s experiencing this at the very core of it. The reader is all-important.”

Gray’s Anatomy, the 19th-century medical textbook, not the American TV series, provided the original inspiration for Hannah’s novel. He wanted, he tells me, to write an A–Z of anatomical parts that, when put together, would tell the story of his protagonist’s life. This provided a framework for the novel, from which the subtleties of the plot could then grow.

His narrator is Ivo, a man far too young to be lying in the hospice bed where we first meet him. As Ivo fills his time by playing the A–Z game suggested by his nurse Sheila – working his way through the alphabet, telling stories about body parts beginning with each consecutive letter – the larger narrative of his life, its losses and loves, begins to emerge.

Hannah describes himself as a steady, methodical writer – with a ruthless streak. Before writing The A–Z of You and Me he spent eight years working on another novel, only to bin it when he realised it was not working. He thinks a writer must always be prepared to be take such drastic steps: “You have to know when it’s not good enough, so you can start on the next thing.” If he strikes something through, he never looks at it again.

Having been happy for a long time to fit his writing in alongside his job as a magazine subeditor, family life with his wife, a lecturer in sign language, and their young baby, and playing guitar in a band with friends, Hannah decided four years ago to step things up a level. “I wanted to see where I was in relation to publishing,” he says, so he applied for and was accepted on to the creative writing course run by the literary agency Curtis Brown (in the same class as Kate Hamer).

He began the course with about three-quarters of The A–Z of You and Me already written and finished it realising that agents were desperate for good work. His agent, Sue Armstrong at Conville & Walsh, snapped him up within 10 days of him delivering the finished manuscript.

Luckily for him, Hannah’s writing regime fits perfectly with his day job, which he is not planning to quit just yet. “All the fresh material,” he says, “comes in the last 20 minutes before I go to sleep.” While other people snuggle down with a good book at the end of the day, Hannah takes his notepad to bed with him. “The beauty of writing before you go to sleep is that you often can’t really remember it the next day. If it’s working, you wake up the next day and think, ‘Oh, I think something went well yesterday’, so you look back at it and yes, if it’s good, you type it up and embellish on it.”

Hannah doesn’t keep a notebook of ideas. “It’s too much stuff,” he explains, but can’t imagine not writing every day. He needs the creativity in his life: “I’d have to do something else otherwise I’d be staring at the ceiling every night.” Lucy Scholes

The A–Z of You and Me is published on 12 March by Doubleday, £12.99

Best of the rest: more fiction debuts

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

(Doubleday, £12.99, 15 Jan)

A tense, psychological thriller featuring an unreliable – often drunk – narrator who sees a murder and betrayal (or does she?) through the window of a London commuter train. Rear Window meets Gone Girl.

Weathering by Lucy Wood

(Bloomsbury, £16.99, 15 Jan)

Winner of the Somerset Maugham award 2013 for her short story collection Diving Belles, Wood explores the boundaries between myth and reality in this story of three generations of women, set deep in the English countryside.

Don’t Let Him Know by Sandip Roy

(Bloomsbury, £16.99, 29 Jan)

A portrait of modern India and a story about family, which moves between the hair salons of Calcutta and and the McDonald’s drive-thrus of California exploring the distance between continents, generations and sexualities.

The Anchoress by Robyn Cadwalladr

(Faber, £12.99, 5 Feb)

Set in 13th-century England, this tells the story of 17-year-old Sarah’s bid to escape grief and sadness by becoming a holy woman – and her realisation that even the walls of her cell cannot keep the outside world at bay.

The Well by Catherine Chanter

(Canongate, £12.99, 5 March)

This accomplished debut (the winner of 2013’s Lucy Cavendish College prize for unpublished fiction) is both a futuristic evocation of a Big Brother society and an Ibsenite fable of humans faced with limited resources. Chanter is already a published poet and short story writer.

The Shore by Sara Taylor

(William Heinemann, £12.99, 26 March)

A collection of interconnecting stories spanning 150 years in the lives of various families living on Tthe Shore – a collection of small islands off the coast of the author’s native Virginia – this ambitious debut is compared by its publisher to Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad.

All Involved by Ryan Gattis

(Picador, 7 May)

A fictional account of six days of looting, arson and murder during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, this adrenalin-fuelled novel from a Briton living in LA is Picador’s biggest spring debut and comes garlanded with praise from David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks).

In My House by Alex Hourston

(Faber, 21 May)

An unsettling, highly original tale of the unlikely friendship between Margaret, a lonely 57-year-old woman, and Anja, the teenage girl she rescues from her trafficker after meeting her in the public conveniences at Gatwick.

The House at the Edge of the World by Julia Rochester

(Viking, 4 June)

Viking’s biggest debut of the year, this is a story about the meaning of home, which explores twinship and family ties in the aftermath of a father’s death.

The Catalyst by Helena Coggan

(Hodder and Stoughton, £14.99, 19 Feb)

At just 15, first-time author Helena Coggan is astonishingly young to have landed a publishing contract. She started writing her fantasy novel, set in a dystopian future, when she was just 13. Lisa O’Kelly