As former Man Booker shortlistees and bestselling New Yorker hacks tumble onto the front tables at Waterstones, it sometimes seems hard for the new voices to come through. But every year, there are reputations being made as first novelists or writers produce their breakthrough books. These are the people who, in five years’ time, will be on those front tables. Here, as a heads up for you, our discriminating readers, are six of 2019’s most promising names to watch.

The American writer and journalist’s first book is perhaps this summer’s hottest literary ticket. a decade in the researching, it offers an anatomy of female sexual longing through the experiences of three real women on whose lives Ms Lisa Taddeo reports – one whose formative sexual encounter was with a high-school teacher, one who flees a sterile marriage for an affair and one who sleeps with men her husband selects for her.

Ms Kerry Hudson’s non-fiction debut (she’s already a well-regarded novelist) sets out her traumatic and peripatetic childhood in a series of shabby B&Bs and unfurnished council flats in Scotland and England as the daughter of a chaotically unstable single mother. It’s a shocking description of childhood trauma – rape, abuse and deprivation – that aims to show how, as Ms Hudson writes, “We live in the world’s sixth-richest economy but one-fifth of us live in poverty.”

Canadian-born Ms Joanna Pocock won the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for this blend of memoir and reportage. Ms Pocock moved, with her husband and young daughter, from London to Montana in middle age and combines an account of the existential crises of menopause with lyrical descriptions of the wild landscape of the American West and fascinating reportage on the rewilders, ecosexuals and utopians who populate this threatened Eden.

Ms Claire Adam’s first novel has nothing to do with the Mr Eddie Murphy movie of the same name. Instead, it tells the story of identical twins growing up in rural Trinidad and what happens to the family when one of them goes missing. More than just a mystery, it’s a mediation on parental love and the agonies of parental responsibility. Described as combining “a sensitive depiction of family life and the page-flicking urgency of a thriller”, it won the prestigious Desmond Elliott Prize for the year’s best first novel.

One of the most anticipated debuts of the year, The Parisian has the range, sweep and ambition of a 19th-century doorstopper as it follows its medical student hero Midhat Kamal (based on a real historical figure) through Nablus, Cairo, Istanbul, Montpellier and Paris and charts the historical turbulence of the first half of the 20th century in Europe, the Middle East and the tail end of the Ottoman empire. Ms Hammad has attracted comparisons, from Ms Zadie Smith among others, to Mr Gustave Flaubert, Stendhal and Mr Naguib Mahfouz.

Already celebrated for his memoir Maggie And Me and host of London’s most popular literary salon, Mr Damian Barr has moved confidently into fiction with his debut, You Will Be Safe Here. It combines the harrowing story of a 16-year-old boy in South Africa sent to the New Dawn Safari Training Camp to make a man out of him with the story, 100 years earlier, of a British concentration camp during the second Boer War. A moving and shocking transhistorical panorama of cruelty and bigotry, with its roots in true stories, the novel has attracted praise from Ms Kirsty Wark, Ms Aminatta Forna and Mr Graham Norton among many others.