The Waterstones debut fiction prize has shortlisted six first novels representing the “best of the future of fiction”.

The prize, now in its second year, is voted for by Waterstones booksellers and open to all debut fiction published in the UK. This year’s contenders include Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s dystopian novel Chain-Gang All-Stars, Colin Walsh’s small-town thriller Kala, and Alice Winn’s first world war love story In Memoriam.

Joining these on the shortlist are two novels that were also up for this year’s Women’s prize for fiction: Cecile Pin’s Wandering Souls, which was longlisted for the 2023 prize, and Jacqueline Crooks’s Fire Rush, which made the shortlist. Completing the Waterstones list is Close to Home, Michael Magee’s story of class struggle and masculinity.

Bea Carvalho, Waterstones head of books, described the shortlist as “united by an astonishing command of storytelling, balancing tradition with innovation”. These novels are “imbued with enormous ambition and passion, often drawing on the lived experience of the authors, their families or communities, to dazzling effect”, she said.

Though the prize is open to any debut novel written or translated into English, New York-based Adjei-Brenyah is the only writer on the 2023 shortlist who does not live in the UK or Ireland. Chain-Gang All-Stars, his first novel following a New York Times-bestselling collection of short stories, Friday Black, is set in an imagined near-future in which “gladiator” prisoners fight against one another for their freedom. Speaking about the novel in a Guardian interview, the author said America’s penal system was “a kind of poison that affects us, even if we’re not impacted directly. I wanted to speak to that.” LJ, a bookseller at Waterstones Haywards Heath, said of Chain-Gang All-Stars:“[It] made me feel every single emotion.”

Meanwhile Walsh’s Kala follows a group of old friends who are reunited in the seaside village of Kinlough, where their friend Kala Lannan went missing 15 years earlier. Jumping between the fateful summer and the police investigation following the discovery of her remains years later, the novel is “both a genuine page-turner and a profound meditation on memory and how it shapes our lives”, according to Guardian reviewer Ruth Gilligan. Waterstones Durham bookseller Emily called it “a stunning portrayal of a small-town community and the impacts of people’s actions”.

Crooks’s Fire Rush is about the experiences of a young woman in London, Bristol and Jamaica. A novel that, she told the Observer, took her 16 years to write, Fire Rush is a fictionalisation of the writer’s diary entries from her younger years.

Colin Grant, in his Guardian review, called Crooks’s novel “a subterranean ghost story of intergenerational trauma,” which succeeds with “great aplomb”; while Katy, Waterstones Fosse Park bookseller, described it as “dense, clever, angry, liberating”.

Close to Home, by Magee, depicts Sean, the first from his working-class family to go to university, as he struggles to readjust to home in Belfast after graduating. Returning to an area still stifled and suffering through the final throes of the Troubles, Sean attempts to come to terms with his surroundings and his identity.

Keiran Goddard praised Magee’s novel in his Guardian review, calling it “gripping due to its unfaltering and deftly executed commitment to psychological empathy”.

Tracking children Anh, Minh and Thanh on their 1980s journey from Vietnam through Hong Kong to London, Cecile Pin’s Wandering Souls portrays the experience of Vietnamese refugees as they attempt to settle in to an unwelcoming UK. The novel attempts to reckon with the devastating impact of US involvement in Vietnam, the hostility of Thatcherite Britain, and both the hardships and joys of the immigrant experience. “Wandering Souls is a poignant saga with its grieving, beating heart firmly in the right place,” wrote Sharlene Teo in her Guardian review.

In Memoriam is set against the brutality of the first world war’s front lines, following the love affair between two teenagers who enlist as soldiers. Tracking Henry and Sidney from the protection of their English boarding school to the ruthlessness of war, Winn’s novel has been labelled “a masterpiece” by Waterstones Oxford bookseller Mason, and a “a vivid rendering of the madness and legacy of the first world war” by Observer reviewer Hephzibah Anderson.

Waterstones announced its debut fiction prize in April 2022, and the inaugural winner was Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch. This year’s winner will be announced on 24 August. Waterstones also runs a children’s book prize and names a book of the year, which covers all genres.