When the three judges of the RedSquibble Debut Prize sat down for their last session, there were eleven books on the table. Five of the six below were among them. By evening, only the shortlist remained, and Frances Albright was stacking the other books in a neat pile with both hands, as if they might be hurt by the move.
"People will read the shortlist and assume the rest lost," she said. "That's the wrong word. They ran out of room."
We asked the judges to talk about each of the six longlisted books that did not advance, what they admired, and what finally tipped the vote. They were candid. They were also, all three of them, still visibly arguing.
The Undertow Club, by Beatrice Lang
Beatrice Lang's mystery, set at a winter swim club in the fictional town of Gullhaven, Massachusetts, was the first of the twelve to fall, in a session a week before the final one. Wendell Osei has not forgiven the vote.
"I have sold mysteries for twenty-two years, and this is a real one," he said. "Every clue is on the page. I missed half of them and I was glad to."
Albright admired the construction but wanted one more shock. "It works like a very good watch," she said. "I wanted it to surprise me once more than it did."
Iron & Honey, by Rosa Delacroix-Vance
The judges read Rosa Delacroix-Vance's fantasy in galleys, weeks before its September 22 release. All three praised the kingdom of Vell, its map and its invented beekeepers' language. The debate was about proportion.
"The world is finished. I am not sure the heroine is yet," Albright said. "The first hundred pages belong to the geography."
Rafael Quintero disagreed, gently. "Fantasy readers will forgive a slow start if the world is real, and this one is," he said. "I would read the sequel tomorrow. I would read the glossary again tomorrow."
Orbit of the Lesser Moons, by Kai Nakamura-Holt
If there was a seventh book, this was it. Kai Nakamura-Holt's quiet science fiction novel, about an engineer finding letters from a crew four decades gone, was the last title cut on the final afternoon. Quintero argued for it for nearly an hour.
"Nothing happens in this book the way nothing happens in a hospital at night, which is to say everything happens."
That line is Quintero's, and he said it twice during deliberations. Osei was moved by the book but troubled by a long middle stretch about a delayed supply ship. "It repeats what the letters already told us," he said. "Take out thirty pages and I think we are having a different conversation."
Glasshouse Summer, by Imani Clarke
The panel agreed early that a romance belonged in serious contention, and Imani Clarke's novel about a botanist and a restoration architect saving a Victorian greenhouse was the one they chose to fight over.
"It's the book I'd hand to someone who tells me they don't read," Osei said. "Within ten pages they would."
The hesitation came in the final act. "The genre asks for an obstacle near the end, and she supplied one right on schedule," Albright said. "I would have liked her to trust Nell and Theo a little more. They had already earned it."
A Grammar of Small Birds, by Tomasz Wren
The only poetry on the longlist forced the judges to compare 112 pages of verse with novels four times its length. Quintero read the closing sonnet, "Wren, February," aloud at two separate meetings.
"Ten of these poems would belong on any list in any year," Albright said. "The collection as a whole has one soft stretch in the middle, a sequence of prose poems that loses the tension of the tighter forms."
Osei framed it differently. "It was never about whether Tomasz is good enough," he said. "It was whether we could honestly weigh one sonnet against four hundred pages. We couldn't solve that, and I think that hurt him more than it should have."
What the River Kept, by Delia Montrose
Delia Montrose's self-published memoir, about retracing her late father's route down the Mississippi, was Albright's book from the start. She read it twice before the longlist was named.
"It's the most honest book of the twelve," she said. "She lets her father be difficult, and she lets herself be unsure what to do about it."
What held it back was the ending. "The last several hundred miles of river go by in about a dozen pages," Albright said. "After all that patience, the book hurries home."
Osei, for his part, was not worried about its future. "Delia sold nine thousand copies with a folding table and a book club," he said. "She did not need us to find readers. We were lucky to be among them."
The Other Six
None of the judges would call this list a consolation. Quintero said he has already mailed copies of two of these books to friends. Osei said the upstairs room at Crooked Stair Books has a shelf for all six, and that he has no plans to take it down after October 30.
"A shortlist is one afternoon's best guess," Albright said, straightening the pile one more time. "Readers get to keep guessing for years."
The winner of the 2026 RedSquibble Debut Prize, chosen from the six shortlisted books, will be announced October 30.
Senior writer. Julian profiles debut novelists and the lives they write around. He spent a decade as a features reporter at newspapers across New England.
