The VCU Cabell First Novelist Award honors an outstanding debut novel published in the preceding calendar year.  

Now over two decades old, the Award has honored a range of novels and their authors since its inception in 2002. At present, volunteer readers, students in the Department of English's MFA in Creative Writing program, and a final judging panel are narrowing the field to select a winner from some 200 annual submissions. 

This years' Top 20 Finalists:

• The Edge of Water by Olufunke Grace Bankole (Tin House) 

Set between Nigeria and New Orleans, The Edge of Water tells the story of a young woman who dreams of life in America, as the collision of traditional prophecy and individual longing tests the bonds of a family during a devastating storm. (Zando)

• Homeseeking by Karissa Chen (G.P. Putnam's Sons)

From WWII to 2008, this searing story follows one couple across sixty years as world events pull them together and apart, exploring what it means to find home far from your homeland. (Penguin Random House)

•  The Bright Years by Sarah Damoff (Simon & Schuster)

One family. Four generations. A secret son. A devastating addiction. A Texas family is met with losses and surprises of inheritance, but they’re unable to shake the pull back toward each other in this family saga perfect for readers of Mary Beth Keane and Claire Lombardo. (Simon & Schuster)

•  Small Ceremonies by Kyle Edwards (Pantheon)

A poignant and heart-wrenching coming-of-age story that follows the friendships, hopes, fears, and struggles of a group of Native high school students from Winnipeg, Manitoba’s North End, illuminating what it’s like to grow up in the heart of an Indigenous city. (Penguin Random House)

• The Devil Three Times by Rickey Fayne (Little, Brown & Company)

A debut of enormous ambition spanning eight generations of a Black family in West Tennessee as they are repeatedly visited by the Devil (Nathan Harris, New York Times bestselling author of The Sweetness of Water). (Hachette)

•  Sky Daddy by Kate Folk (Random House)

Cross the jet bridge with Linda, a frequent flyer with an unusual obsession, in this “audaciously imagined and surprisingly tender” (Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch) debut novel by the acclaimed author of Out There. (Penguin Random House)

• Great Black Hope by Rob Franklin (Summit Books)

A gripping debut from an electrifying new voice about an upwardly mobile and downwardly spiraling Black man caught between worlds of race and class, glamourous parties and sudden consequences, a friend’s mysterious death and his own arrest. (Simon & Schuster)

• Blue Futures, Break Open by Zoë Gadegbeku (West Virginia University Press)

Zoë Gadegbeku’s lyrical hybrid novel Blue Futures, Break Open draws on colonialism in the Americas and Africa in addition to the history of the African diaspora to create a slant mythological response to some of the greatest injustices in human history. (Foreword Reviews)

•  The White Hot by Quiara Alegría Hudes (One World)

The story of a runaway mother’s ten days of freedom—and the pain, desire, longing, and wonder we find on the messy road to enlightenment—from Pulitzer Prize winner Quiara Alegría Hudes. (Penguin Random House)

•  A Thousand Natural Shocks by Omar Hussain (Blackstone)

Omar Hussain's dazzling debut, A Thousand Natural Shocks, is a mesmerizing meditation on trauma, memory, and identity wrapped in a high-octane thriller. (Blackstone)

• Wanting by Claire Jia (Tin House)

A searing debut novel of envy, longing, and regret across three lives and two countries that asks how far we’ll go for a friendship, a romance, a dream. (Zando)

•  The Fantasies of Future Things by Doug Jones (Simon & Schuster)

In this “gorgeously compassionate” (Tayari Jones, New York Times bestselling author of An American Marriage) debut reminiscent of Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, two men in Atlanta reconcile their human dignity against the price of their professional ambitions working for a real estate development company displacing Black residents in preparation for the 1996 Olympics. (Simon & Schuster)

•  Little Movements by Lauren Morrow (Random House)

A “lyrical debut” (USA Today) about a Black woman who is finally given a chance to pursue her dream of becoming a renowned choreographer, only to find that it comes at a tremendous personal cost. (Penguin Random House)

•  Tilt by Emma Pattee (Scribner)

Set over the course of a single day, an electrifying debut novel from “a powerful new literary voice” (Vogue) following one woman’s journey across a transformed city, carrying the weight of her past and a fervent hope for the future. (Simon & Schuster)

•  To the Moon and Back by Eliana Ramage (Avid Reader Press)

In this dazzlingly powerful story of family, ambition and belonging, one young woman’s obsessive quest to become the first Cherokee astronaut irrevocably alters the fates of the people she loves most. (Simon & Schuster)

•  Endling by Maria Reva (Doubleday)

Set in Ukraine, an eccentric scientist breeding rare snails crosses paths with sisters posing as members of the marriage industry to find their activist mother. As Russia invades, they embark on a wild journey with kidnapped bachelors and a last-of-its-kind snail. This darkly comic novel explores survival, love, and hope in times of encroaching darkness. (Penguin Random House)

•  North Sun, or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther by Ethan Rutherford (A Strange Object/Deep Vellum)

From "one of our great artists of catastrophe" (Laura van den Berg) comes North Sun, or the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther—an allegory of extraction and a tale of adventure and endurance during the waning days of the American whaling industry. (Deep Vellum)

•  Transplants by Daniel Tam-Claiborne (Regalo Press)

A harrowing and poignant novel following two young women in pursuit of kinship and self-discovery who yearn to survive in a world that doesn’t know where either of them belong. (Simon & Schuster)

•  Girls Girls Girls by Shoshana von Blanckensee (G.P. Putnam's Sons)

A vibrant queer Jewish debut “teeming with heart, angst, love, and self discovery” (Emily Austin) about a young woman who, caught between the expectations of others and her own evolving desires, is forced to make a series of fraught life-altering decisions. (Goodreads)

•  Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu (Little, Brown & Company)

Luster meets The Idiot in this riveting debut novel about a volatile friendship between two outsiders who escape their bleak childhoods and enter the glamorous early ’90s art world in New York City, where only one of them can make it. (Hachette)