The L-Shaped Room (novel) The L-Shaped Room (novel) The L-Shaped Room is a 1960 British novel by Lynne Reid Banks which tells the story of a young woman, unmarried and pregnant, who moves into a London boarding house, befriending a young man in the building. It was adapted into a film by Bryan Forbes with significant differences from the novel. "The L-Shaped Room" is set in the late 1950s and follows a young woman, Jane Graham, who arrives alone at a run-down boarding house in London after being turned out of her comfortable middle class home by her shocked father after telling him she
Debut novel earliest attested usage of "first novel" is from 1876. However, the term is much older, with instances going back to at least 1800. The "Oxford English Dictionary" doesn't have an entry for "debut novel." The earliest usage of "debut novel" in the Google Books database is 1930 (). The Google Books Ngram Viewer shows it becoming more widely used after about 1980, gaining in popularity since. Debut novel A debut novel is the first novel a novelist publishes. Debut novels are often the author's first opportunity to make an impact on the publishing industry, and thus the success or failure