Somewhere around 1996, the wall between the prize longlist and the bestseller table started to come down. A novel could take the Booker or the Pulitzer and still end up in a beach bag; a book-club paperback could outsell them both and then, years later, be reappraised as the real thing. This weekly puzzle lives in that whole span of contemporary fiction - the award darlings, the word-of-mouth phenomena, and the literary novels that quietly outlast their own hype.
What we keep coming back to is where a book begins. Almost every novel has an origin buried under the finished thing: a newspaper clipping, a grandmother's silence, a subject the writer circled for years before daring to touch it. Kristin Hannah has said she avoided writing about the Second World War for a long time, and only committed after reading about a Belgian woman who guided downed Allied airmen out of occupied Europe on foot. That real courier became the seed of a novel that sold in the millions.
Because a book is also a business, every answer here names two things: the novelist and the house that published them. Getting the author is the game; noticing the imprint is the flourish.