61.   All of which make him eminently qualified to take on Manhattan as subject, target, and major character of this gargantuan first novel.

62.   Alten, whose writing is flat despite all the mayhem, has sold film rights to his first novel to Disney.

63.   But in her first novel, she seems to have set her sights on the kind of movie shown on television opposite Monday-night football.

64.   But much of the delay seemed to derive from the fact that his first novel had found only a limited audience, despite winning that award.

65.   But one of the things you come to appreciate is the amazing thing that a writer could write a good first novel at all.

66.   But she writes with an authority and tough beauty astonishing in a first novel.

67.   But with his first noncomic novel, he portrays a society engaged in a cultural civil war.

68.   Chewed-over subjects like bad marriage and the immorality of Hollywood are risky business for a first novel.

69.   Children are one more measure of success to me, like an IPO or a first novel.

70.   Coningsby has been called the first political novel, in the sense that political moving and shaking plays a central role in the story.