Every spring the front table fills up with debuts, and every spring we fall hard for a handful of them. Here are five first novels that had the whole shop passing copies across the counter.

1. The Lantern Year — Mireille Okafor

A quiet, devastating book about memory and the things we leave unsaid. Rae read it in a single sitting and immediately bought three more copies for the staff shelf.

2. Field Notes for the End of Summer — J. A. Vance

Technically poetry, spiritually a novel. Vance writes like someone leaving postcards from a life slightly more vivid than yours.

The best debuts don’t announce themselves. They just refuse to leave your head.

Rae, fiction buyer

3–5. The rest of the shelf

• On Keeping a Commonplace Book — Lena Hartveldt
• Saltwater Almanac — Devi Raman
• The Paper Museum — Tomas Brandt

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Come in and ask for the spring debuts table — every copy has a hand-written note tucked inside.