51.   A first novel about a girl whose life is transformed when she wins a spelling bee.

52.   A first novel charts the escalating tension between a woman and her teen-age daughter in a New England mill town.

53.   A first novel, passionately attentive to nuance, that explores the transit between the Caribbean and North America through a love affair between two women.

54.   A remarkable first novel by Candice Proctor that truly touches the heart.

55.   A panoramic first novel about Orthodox Jewish life.

56.   A protege of Joyce Carol Oates at Princeton, Czuchlewski is still wet behind the ears, but his first novel is a decent spoof on postmodernist narrators.

57.   A previously unpublished first novel.

58.   A very few first novels make the best-seller lists.

59.   After he concluded that his first novel was unpublishable, though, he set aside his writerly aspirations and went into the antiquarian book business.

60.   After Tony Hillerman showed the manuscript of his first novel to his agent at the time, the agent advised him to stick to nonfiction.