This week, a slight left-turn. On the blog last Friday, Claire Armitstead opened up nominations for the 10th spot on the first book award longlist. The idea is that we ask you to draw our attention to any brilliant debuts - fiction, non-fiction or poetry - which we might have missed in our trawl for the longlist (books from small publishers, perhaps, or self-published works). Dozens of you came on to suggest, and offer brief reviews of, your darlings; here are some of my favourites.

The great triumph of the project so far is undoubtedly its coaxing of the splendid AggieH, stalwart of the theguardian.com/books community, into the rough-and-tumble of reader reviewing. "Only because Claire Armitstead is making me if I want to nominate this book, I've posted a hasty, unreliable review," she said, parlously underselling what was in fact a deft appreciation of her nomination, Jonas Jonasson's The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out Of The Window And Disappeared.
The novel, originally published in Sweden last year (and therefore eligible for the FBA because it's out in the UK within five years of being published in its original language) tells the story of Allan Karlsson, who crawled "out the window and ran away from his old people's home just before his 100th birthday party was to start. Creaked away, rather," AggieH tells us, "slightly weighed down by elderly joints and properly weighed down by a suitcase that he grumpily stole because his bus started to leave before the rude biker who asked him to watch it came back from the loo." Her review reflects the murky wit of the original: the plot, she says, "sounds absurd and ... is, but in the best and traditional sense of the word. It's a farce and a fable. And as a fable should, it offers dark undertones including some delightful dictator-satire." Sounds brilliant. I'll be reading.

The process of calling for nominations threw up the perennial problem of log-rolling, which riled some posters no end - although we ended up with a pretty interesting discussion of whether in fact it might be acceptable in these circumstances to hawk your own wares; as tenuousfives has it, "everything is about selling". Even so, I wouldn't normally highlight a review that's transparently by a publisher, given the obvious bias, but Dzanc Books' notice for their own novel The Backslider by Sean McGrady pointed me to a very good earlier review of the same book by Eileentp, which paints McGrady as a sort of north-of-the-border Roddy Doyle. "The Backslider is a breath of overdue fresh air," she says.

Set in a Belfast ravaged with the daily mayhem of death and destruction, yet a city where living life as close to the normality of one's age, was paramount. Seán McGrady has skilfully interspersed the story with common Belfast phraseology, which works wonderfully well and lends a feel of knowing the characters intimately

Surely a contender.

Thanks for all your reviews this week; Aggie, Eileen and Dzanc Books, drop me a line and I'll send you a book. And keep nominating your debuts, meanwhile; there's still time.