Five debut female authors to discover in 2025
If you're looking for some 2025 reading inspiration, why not explore the impressive roster of debut female authors in fiction? There are fresh and exciting new voices, like Catherine Airey, whose debut, Confessions, is a compulsive, original read. Or there's the ambitious, emotional doorstopper, Homeseeking – the ambition of which belies the fact that it's the first novel from writer Karissa Chen.
This year also sees some established poets and short-story writers take to long form for the first time, like the award-winning Wendy Erskine, whose inaugural novel, The Benefactors, loses none of the wit and nuanced character work of her short-form prose; the literary wunderkind Saba Sams, whose debut novel is released this spring; and the acclaimed poet, Aria Aber, whose first work of fiction, Good Girl, is a revelation.
Their stories span family dynamics, trauma, shame, love and war, transporting you from the club scene in Berlin and Brighton to the art world of 1980s New York, the civil war in China in the 1930s, and the sexual mores of a neighbourhood in modern-day Belfast.
So pull up a chair and explore...
1/ Catherine Airey
Airey’s debut, Confessions, has the most arresting of opening gambits. A teenage girl is alone in her New York apartment on the morning of September 11th. She skips school to drop acid. Then, the first plane hits the World Trade Centre tower in which her father’s office resides. Her world will never be the same again. “That was the first thing I wrote, and those first few chapters are pretty much unchanged,” she says. “That’s surprising to me because I didn't know what the story would become or how many different voices or places it would encompass.”
The resulting novel is beautifully not quite one thing or another, driven by the whims and passions and tragedies of its central characters and split in its narration from each of them. There is Cora Brady, whose fate is forever changed after that fateful terror attack. Then there are her mother and aunt, Máire and Róisín Dooley, whose narratives are spun during the 1970s and 1980s in rural Ireland – where Airey herself now lives – and Manhattan. The novel covers everything from the trippy hedonism of the New York art scene of the 1980s to the abortion rights movement in Ireland up to 2018.
The latter is deftly approached through the arching narrative device of a fictitious ‘choose your own adventure’ video game, which neatly mirrors the choices – or lack thereof – afforded some of the central female characters. “I was really fascinated by that idea,” says Airey, who hopes the book highlights the relative complacency to be found in nations with access to abortion.
But perhaps Confessions is all the more impressive when you consider that Airey almost didn’t write it. “I've always, always wanted to write a novel. I have diary entries when I was a kid saying, ‘I really want to be an author’,” she says. “But I think my confidence took a hit when I went to university and felt so overwhelmed by the feeling that everybody was way smarter than I was. It took me years to stop feeling daunted and just do it.”
Anyone who reads her striking debut, will be extremely glad that she did.
Confessions
Confessions by Catherine Airey is out now
2/ Karissa Chen
Chen’s masterful and ambitious debut novel began life almost 20 years ago in the aftermath of her grandfather’s death. While going through his belongings, she found a photograph she had never seen before. It was of her grandfather as a grown man, weeping before his mother’s grave in Shanghai. He had not seen her since they were separated when he was just 19 years old. To Chen, what lived within that snapshot was a forgotten narrative of the families torn apart by the Chinese Civil War and those who fled to Taiwan, often never to see their loved ones again.
“I began to do my research and found out that my grandfather was one of about 2 million people this happened to,” she says of a project that began life back in 2010 and involved countless interviews with soldiers and their families. “The more I learnt, the more heartbreaking it all was. I initially thought I would turn it into an essay but, after a while, I realised I had to write it as a novel.”
Chen, who splits her time between New Jersey and Taipei, is already an established short-story writer, but Homeseeking marks her novelistic debut. It is vast in scale, covering a time span from the 1930s in Shanghai to Los Angeles in 2008, following the lives of two young lovers, Haiwen and Suchi, torn apart by war, who find themselves reunited as septuagenarians. It is mesmerising in its balance between global events and intimate suffering, and its portrayal of ruptured lives is heartrending.
“I'm really fascinated with memory and the ways in which we think about the decisions that we have made in our lives, and whether or not we can live with regret – or whether or not regret is even something that is present,” says Chen. She hopes that, in reading it, people might have a deeper understanding of that time period and also of the interior lives of immigrant communities, filled with people who have carried so much from their homeland: memories, traumas and regrets. “I hope readers might become a little empathetic to that, more generous with their hearts and their minds.”
Homeseeking
Homeseeking by Karissa Chen is out 6 March
3/ Aria Aber
“I think there have been a lot of misrepresentations of Berlin,” says Ari Aber. “I wanted to write about the danger and dark side and, in doing so, I also wanted to kind of rectify its image. In some sense, I think of the novel as a love letter to the city.”
That novel, Good Girl, is Aber’s first foray into prose, having previously established herself as an award-winning poet. Her sentences, thankfully, maintain the imagery and cadence of her poetry. “I found that maintaining the pacing and tension over long-form narrative was one of the most difficult aspects of writing the book,” she says. “I wasn't trained as a fiction writer, but it was also not that unnatural to me, because I think I have a more novelistic disposition than a poetic one.” She attributes this to her upbringing; Aber was raised in Germany, but her Afghan family are a collective “of very funny and elaborate storytellers. Narrative was all around me.”
The story of Good Girl, she says, “demanded to be told as a novel”. It is an astonishing and compelling book, telling the tale of Nila, a 19-year-old daughter of Afghan refugees living in Berlin and navigating two seemingly incompatible worlds: her immigrant community and her life in the underground techno scene of the city. It encompasses first love, art, shame and identity, and the ever-present threat of the far right. The novel is far from autobiographical, but the author’s understanding of both spheres sings through in its piercing authenticity. “I think part of the beauty of fiction is that you don't have to stay true to the facts,” she says. “You can make the story just that bit more interesting.”
Good Girl
Good Girl by Aria Aber is out now
4/ Wendy Erskine
This may be the first novel from acclaimed short-story writer Wendy Erskine, but she did not abandon her well-honed short-form skills when approaching this work. A cacophony of voices meet in The Benefactors in connected and often seemingly utterly disconnected ways, all of them given Erskine’s trademark attention to character, all of them like mini short stories of their own. “It was like inviting a load of people to your house for a party and wondering; how's it going to go? Who's going to get on with who? Is it all going to kick off?” she says.
The novel is a delightful success on this front, a blend of vignettes from a range of voices in Belfast and beyond, centred around the lives of three very different mothers, whose teenage sons are accused of assaulting a young girl, Misty. We also hear from Misty and her surrogate father, Boogie. The success of The Benefactors is the way it treads across familiar fare – sexual assault, the rise of sites like OnlyFans and the associated judgements, the intersections of class and our innate hypocrisies – and tackles them in surprising ways. She does this mostly through what she doesn’t spell out. “That’s the kind of choice you have to make, isn't it? Are you going to give access to all the interiority? Are you going to trust that you have got a reader who's going to be supplying what they think might be going on in a character’s mind?” she says. “I think with short stories, you do that a lot. So I tried to trust the reader here, too.”
The Benefactors
The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine is out 19 June
5/ Saba Sams
Sams, the author of the prize-winning short story collection Send Nudes, has become such a ‘name’ in the literary world, it is hard to believe this year’s Gunk is her debut novel. “It’s exciting and scary,” she says. “With Send Nudes I had no expectation, but the second book feels slightly different. I found the writing process initially much harder than short form, because the length made everything feel so unwieldy. Editing was easier, though, with only one narrative to think about!”
Gunk feels very in-keeping with Sams’ earlier work; acutely observed and tight in focus. The novel follows the unconventional relationship between Jules, Nim and a newborn baby, set against the backdrop of Brighton nightlife. “Struck by the isolation and division I felt when I became a young mother myself, I wanted to write a novel that opened up what motherhood could be and look like,” Sams explains. “I wanted to explore how it might not be necessary to actually give birth in order to become a mother, but rather to witness a birth and allow yourself to be changed by it.”
Sams’ native Brighton soon became “a character in itself” but it was the connection between Jules and Nim that kept her tethered to the narrative. “With Jules and Nim, I wanted to write a relationship that couldn’t be defined. The two women are interchangeably friends, housemates, employee and boss, mother and daughter, parents, and lovers,” she explains. “I wasn’t only interested in breaking down the definition of 'mother' in the novel, but modern relationships in general. It seems to me that these terms are limiting the ways in which we care for each other.”
Gunk
Gunk by Saba Sams is out 8 May
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