Fresh from selling film rights to Scott Rudin and signing a $2m publishing deal in the US, the novelist Garth Risk Hallberg has struck a "substantial" six-figure deal with Jonathan Cape in the UK for his 900-page debut novel, City on Fire.

As the scramble for rights continues around the world, publishers are lining up to salute a book which his lucky UK editor described as "the best American novel I've ever read on submission". But the 34-year-old Hallberg is no literary ingenue. A regular reviewer for the New York Times Book Review and a contributing editor to the online literary magazine The Millions, Hallberg has been steadily publishing short fiction for almost a decade – his illustrated novella, A Field Guide to the North American Family, appeared in 2007.

Now he has produced a novel which reaches its climax with a backdrop of vandalism, looting and arson in the 1977 New York City blackout – a story of such scale, ambition and readability that it has become this year's publishing sensation.

According to Hallberg's UK editor, Alex Bowler, who acquired UK rights after a week-long seven-way battle, the novel is "the only thing people are talking about in the industry".

"It's a distillation of great American writing," he said. "You can feel people like Don DeLillo, James Baldwin, Tom Wolfe and Patti Smith animating the writing – it's got that fizz, that energy and ambition. But I wouldn't use other books as comparisons. It's more like an HBO box set."

Readers hear publishers talking about "masterpieces" with a sinking heart, he continued, fearing that boredom is just around the corner, but City on Fire is "a pure joy to read. We mainlined it – people here were reading it in a day-and-a-half."

The polished third-person narration conjures up a cast of characters living in a New York City divided by race and money – the reluctant heirs to a great fortune, two Long Island kids exploring downtown's nascent punk scene, a gay schoolteacher from rural Georgia, an obsessive magazine reporter, a revolutionary cell planning to set the Bronx ablaze, a trader with a hole on his balance sheet and a detective who is trying to piece together the mystery which connects them all to a shooting in Central Park.

With a breadth that illuminates every corner of the city, Hallberg's ambition, accessibility and characterisation make City on Fire positively Dickensian, Bowler continued. "It does what only a novel can do. It makes you look at your city, your living environment, the people around you, with fresh eyes."

In the year of Richard House's 1,002-page The Kills and Sergio de la Pava's 696-page A Naked Singularity, when Eleanor Catton's 832-page The Luminaries won the Booker prize, this substantial deal is the latest in a series of big-money signings for debut authors. The 2013 London Book Fair was set alight by six-figure signings of first novels from Emma Healey, Jessie Burton and Matthew Thomas.

Hallberg is declining to give interviews, preferring to concentrate on what his editor called the "fine tuning" of a novel planned for publication in 2015. But, according to Bowler, the novelist's fierce literary intelligence isn't the only thing which marks him out as a literary superstar.

"You get these extremely smart authors," he said. "The thing that sets Hallberg apart is his charm. You can put him in a room and everybody will feel that he's the future of literature. Literature is in safe hands."

 This article was amended on 25 November 2013, to reinstate Alex Bowler's qualification that City on Fire was the best American novel he had read "on submission"