Welcome to Sarah's Bookshelves Live. I'm your host, Sarah Dickinson. Join me every other week as we get real and sometimes a bit snarky about books and reading. Let's get rolling.

Welcome to our 2025 debuts special.

And what we mean by debuts is an author's first book or first novel. And Catherine and Chrissy are joining me for this year's episode. Welcome, Catherine and Chrissy. Thank you. Thank you.

So here's how today is going to work. We are going to talk about how debuts have worked for us in general this year so far, share a little bit of stats for our debuts.

And then we're going to get into the debuts that we have loved this year in two categories.

Number one, we're going to talk about our favorite 2025 debuts.

Each one of us is going to share three.

And then we're going to share some of our favorite backlist debuts that we read this year. And each one of us is going to share two.

But starting things off with our kind of overview of how debuts worked for us this year. For the

second year in a row, how I'm feeling about

debuts was not quite borne out in the numbers when I actually looked at my tracker, but kind of in

the opposite direction from how this happened to me last year. Last year, I felt like I did not

have a great reading year with debuts, but my numbers were actually really good.

And this year, it's the opposite situation.

I love that you're all in your feelings, Sarah.

You're just so pragmatic that I love that you're talking about feelings.

Well, first of all, I'm in pariamineopause, so feelings.

I also feel like, no matter what the numbers say about my reading, what matters to me is feeling good about my reading, right?

Right.

Like, I kind of don't care what the numbers say.

If I'm feeling bad about my reading, then that's it for me, right?

Yeah. This year, I feel like I've had a great debut year, but my success numbers are actually down a bit from last year. So I've read almost the same number of debuts as last year at this point in the year, 28. And by the way,

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