The L-Shaped Room Academy Award for Best Actress. A 27-year-old French woman, Jane Fosset (Caron), arrives alone at a run down boarding house in Notting Hill, London, moving into an L-shaped room. Beautiful but withdrawn, she encounters the residents of her house, each a social outsider in his or her own way, including a gay black guitar player. Jane is pregnant and has no desire to marry the father. On her first visit to a doctor, she wants to find out if she really is pregnant and consider her options. The doctor's facile assumption that she must want either marriage or an abortion
Debut novel sales are anticipated, the advance can be larger. For an example of an unusually high advance: in 2013, the highly anticipated "City on Fire" by Garth Risk Hallberg captured the attention of ten publishers who started a bidding war that ended with Knopf buying the rights to the book for 2 million dollars. The book's film production rights were purchased soon after by producer Scott Rudin. For similar reasons that advances are frequently not very large—novels frequently don't sell well until the author gains a literary reputation. There are exceptions, however; YouTube star Zoella published her debut novel "Girl Online"