According to those in the industry, it’s been a rough year for novelists. Readers want memoirs. They want diet books. They want war on terror. Ideally, readers want memoirs about people losing weight while fighting the war on terror. But novels? To hear America’s booksellers tell it, you could leave a pile of literary fiction on a Baghdad street corner and still have trouble shifting it.

At a reading at the Harvard Book Store last Thursday, however, rumors of the novel’s demise seemed to have been greatly exaggerated. Fiction fans thronged. They jostled. There was a sense of eagerness bordering on agitation in the air — as if somebody had just spotted Avril Lavigne. This reporter had to use his clout just to get near the reading area. And then he had to suffer a gauntlet of spiteful stares, of how-dare-you intakes of breath. At the Harvard that night, novelists were hot.

But these weren’t just any novelists. Alan Warner, Andrew O’Hagan, and Zadie Smith are three of the writers recently named by the literary quarterly Granta as the Best of Young British Novelists 2003. Granta does this only once a decade. In 1983, it picked the likes of Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Graham Swift, and A.N. Wilson. In 1993, there were Iain Banks, Kazuo Ishiguro, Esther Freud, Will Self, and Nicholas Shakespeare. Even if the names Buchi Emecheta and Candia McWilliam don’t trip readily from the tongue, being a BYBN is a big deal — if only because it sells books.

It’s easy to scoff at this Best stuff, to roll your eyes at who is — or, more important, who isn’t — on the list, but when the young writers at the Harvard started to read, you could see why they’d made the cut. The two Scots, O’Hagan and Warner, read passages that were funny and smart, poignant at times, indecipherable at others, thick with dialect and semi-obscure British references. The handful of Brits in the audience laughed ostentatiously when they recognized things they knew the Yanks wouldn’t.

The real star of the show, it has to be said, was Zadie Smith, author of the vastly popular novel White Teeth, and, by common decree, a stunning beauty. A Londoner by birth but currently a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard, Smith read a piece set in Harvard Square, which gave Americans in the audience their chance to chuckle knowingly from time to time. The story, "Martha, Martha," displayed not only Smith’s sly humor, but her knack for making the mundane seem lyrical. The audience loved it. They loved her.

When the reading was over, the books signed, the I love your works uttered, the BYBNs — along with Granta editor Ian Jack, some media people, and a few randoms — headed to a nearby bistro for cocktails and canapés. It was a low-key affair. Essayist Sven Birkerts and Boston Globe Ideas editor Alex Star discussed Walker Percy. The BYBNs chatted easily with each other about whatever talented young authors chat easily about. The randoms conversed over glasses of wine. "So what do you do?" "What do you do?" "What do you do?" "What do you do?"

This reporter, meanwhile, used his clout to get close to the cheese table, where he quickly consumed his own body weight in Gouda.

Perhaps it was Zadie Smith’s cheekbones, or maybe it was the sheer weight of literary talent in the room, but it was easy to succumb to a deer-in-the-headlights feeling that night. At one point, Alan Warner and Zadie Smith, discussing screen adaptations of their work, were approached by a cheese-engorged reporter. "If I ever write a novel," the reporter intoned, "I’m going to list who I want to play the characters on the inside page." There was a silence. Wine was sipped. Warner finally spoke.

"‘If I ever write a novel,’" the young British novelist repeated. "That betrays a lack of ambition."