Katherine Heiny

‘Gorgeous. Very, very funny in a knowing wry way but so tender, so beautiful. I loved all the characters.’ Marian Keyes‘Warm, witty, touching – and frequently hilarious’ David Nicholls, author of Sweet Sorrow‘You put the book down and feel glad to be alive’ India Knight, Sunday Times Jane easily falls in love with he's charming, good-natured, and handsome. He has also slept with nearly every woman in Boyne City, Michigan. Jane sees Duncan's old girlfriends everywhere – at restaurants, at the grocery store, even three towns away. While she may be able to come to terms with dating the world's most prolific seducer of women, she wishes she didn't have to share him quite so widely. His ex-wife, Aggie, still has Duncan mow her lawn. And his coworker Jimmy comes and goes from Duncan's apartment at the most inopportune times. Jane wonders how the relationship is supposed to work with all these people in it. But any notion Jane has of love and marriage changes with one tragic accident. Now her life is permanently intertwined with Duncan's, Aggie's, and Jimmy's, and she knows she will never have Duncan to herself. But is it possible that a deeper kind of happiness is right in front of her eyes? A novel that is alternately bittersweet and laugh-out-loud funny, Early Morning Riser is Katherine Heiny's most astonishingly wonderful work to date.

A rueful, funny examination of love, marriage, infidelity, and origami. Simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking, this sensational debut will appeal to fans of David Nicholls, Nick Hornby, Nora Ephron and Lorrie Moore Graham Cavanaugh’s second wife, Audra, is everything his first wife was not. She considers herself privileged to live in the age of the hair towel, talks non-stop through her epidural, labour and delivery, invites the doorman to move in and the eccentric members of their son’s Origami Club to Thanksgiving. She is charming and spontaneous and fun but life with her can be exhausting. In the midst of the day-to-day difficulties and delights of marriage and raising a child with Asperger’s, his first wife, Elspeth, reenters Graham’s life. Former spouses are hard to categorize – are they friends, enemies, old flames, or just people who know you really, really well? Graham starts to wonder: How can anyone love two such different women? Did he make the right choice? Is there a right choice?

The games and rituals performed by Katherine Heiny's characters range from mischievous and edgy to tenderly touching. In "Damascus," a mother fears her teenage son is making the same youthful mistakes she did, only to realize that he is wiser than she had understood. In "Twist and Shout," Ericka's elderly father mistakes his four-thousand-dollar hearing aid for a cashew. In "Turn Back, Turn Back," a bedtime story coupled with a receipt for a Starbucks babyccino reveal a struggling actor's deception. And in "561," Charlene pays the true price of infidelity when she is forced to help her husband's ex-wife move out of the family home. ("It's like you're North Korea and South Korea... But would North Korea help South Korea move?") From one of today's most accomplished bard's of modern life--of waking up in the wrong bed, wearing the wrong shoes, being late for the wrong job, but being loved by the right people--a fresh and satisfying work of glorious humour and immense kindness.