Read the Opening Pages of Five Fall Debuts

A first page has one job, and it is the hardest job in the book. It has to make a stranger keep reading. We asked five debut authors with new books this season to let us share their openings, unedited and in full. Each one does the job differently. One begins with a ledger left open on a kitchen table. One begins with water under a door. Read them in order, or skip to whichever one pulls hardest.

The Salt Orchard by Mara Ellison

Three sisters come home to a Maine apple orchard for one last harvest as the sea works its way into the soil.

The salt came in the year our mother stopped writing things down, and for a long time we believed the two events were unrelated. She had kept the orchard's ledgers since before any of us were born, thirty-eight green clothbound books on the shelf above the pantry door, one for each harvest. Bushels by variety. Frost dates. The name of every man who ever picked for us and whether he could be trusted near the Baldwins. Then one September the ledger for that year stayed on the kitchen table, open to a blank page, with her pen lying across it like a fallen fence rail. June noticed first. June always noticed first, and then waited for someone else to say it. By October the trees along the lower wall had begun to drop their fruit early, small and hard and bitter at the core. Hannah said it was the drought. Tess said it was blight. I said nothing, because I had tasted one, and it tasted like the harbor at low tide. We did not tell our mother. That was the first thing we kept from her, and it was easier than it should have been.

Low Tide Protocol by Priya Venkataraman

A flood modeler realizes her city's evacuation plan was never meant to work, on the night it has to.

The model predicted the water would reach Dorrance Avenue at 3:14 a.m. It was 3:09 when Anika heard it under the door. A soft sound. Almost polite. The sound a cat makes pushing against a screen. She stood in the kitchen in her socks and watched a dark line slide across the linoleum, carrying a bottle cap and a single dry leaf, and she thought, with a clarity that embarrassed her later, five minutes early. Five minutes meant the surge was running high. It meant the tide gauge at Pier Nine was reading low, or lying, or gone. It meant every number she had presented to the city council in April was wrong in the same direction. Her phone showed no alerts. She checked twice. The county siren, the one that tested every first Monday at noon, was silent. She pulled her running shoes on over wet socks and took the laptop from the counter, because the laptop had the model, and so far the model was the only thing in the city that had told the truth. Outside, the streetlights were still on. That would not last.

Orbit of the Lesser Moons by Kai Nakamura-Holt

The lone engineer on a mining station circling a forgotten moon begins receiving letters from its first crew.

The first letter arrived in the water reclamation filter, folded into a perfect square, dated forty-one years before I was born. I found it during the Thursday cycle, which is the only cycle on Hesper Station anyone still bothers to name. The filter clogs every eleven days. I clean it every ten, because I have nothing else to do on the ninth day but dread it. The paper was dry. That was the first impossible thing. It had passed through four stages of reclamation, a centrifuge and a heat bath, and it was as crisp as a page from a new book. The handwriting was careful and slanted. It was addressed to "Whoever keeps the lights on," and I stood in the pump room for a long time, because that is me. That has been me for six years. The station's first crew left long before I existed. Their names are on a plaque beside the airlock, twelve of them, and I have read that plaque so many times I know the tiny scratch through the second L in Lorne Abelard. The letter was signed by Lorne Abelard.

Iron & Honey by Rosa Delacroix-Vance

In the kingdom of Vell the bees choose the queen, and this time they have chosen a disgraced beekeeper's daughter.

The bees had not chosen a queen in ninety years, and so when they chose me, nobody believed them. I was filthy and standing in the royal apiary without permission, holding a smoker that belonged to my father, who was no longer allowed to hold anything in Vell. The swarm came down from the high hives at the second bell. It poured over the gold hives and the iron hives and the old stone skeps nobody used, and it settled on me. On my shoulders, my hair, the backs of my hands. Thousands of them, humming in the low key the keepers call vesh, the key that means home. The Keeper of the Comb dropped her staff. The courtiers along the gallery began to shout. Someone behind me said the word for fraud, then the word for witch, which in the old beekeepers' tongue is the same word said slower. I did not move. My father taught me one thing before they took his veil. When the bees are deciding, you hold still, and you let them.

The Undertow Club by Beatrice Lang

The woman who kept a century-old winter swim club alive is found inside its locked changing hut.

Nobody at the Undertow Club had ever locked the changing hut, which is why it mattered so much that someone had. It was the first Sunday in January, twenty-nine degrees, the water off Gullhaven a flat gray that looked more like poured concrete than anything a sane person would enter. Forty-some members stood on the shingle in robes and wool hats, stamping their feet, waiting for Edith Marsh to come out and blow the whistle. Edith had revived the club in 1979, when it was down to six swimmers, and everyone called her the founder anyway. At five past seven Harold Pike tried the door. It did not open. He tried again, harder, and the old brass latch held. Somebody laughed. Somebody said Edith must have dozed off in there. Then Wendy Coyle, who taught fourth grade and had never once raised her voice at a club meeting, walked to the single frosted window, cupped her hands against the glass, and began to scream. None of us went in the water that day. It was the first Sunday in ninety-seven years that nobody swam.

Keep reading

Every one of these books earns the promise of its first page. Start with whichever opening you can't stop thinking about tonight.

The Salt Orchard by Mara Ellison (Harbor Light Press, $27), Low Tide Protocol by Priya Venkataraman (Northwater Books, $29), Orbit of the Lesser Moons by Kai Nakamura-Holt (Farlight, $28), Iron & Honey by Rosa Delacroix-Vance (Farlight, $30) and The Undertow Club by Beatrice Lang (Bellwether, $27.99) are out now.