Early Morning Riser

By: Katherine Heiny

A wise, bighearted, boundlessly joyful novel of love, disaster, and unconventional family.

Jane falls in love with Duncan easily. He is charming, good-natured, and handsome but unfortunately, he has also slept with nearly every woman in Boyne...Read More

Experience: Make Me Laugh

Format: Hardcover

Genre(s): Humor, Literary Fiction

Page(s): 336

Published: April 2021

Rental Price: $9.99 for six weeks (List Price $26.95 | Save 63%)

A wise, bighearted, boundlessly joyful novel of love, disaster, and unconventional family.

Jane falls in love with Duncan easily. He is charming, good-natured, and handsome but unfortunately, 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 Jane may be able to come to terms with dating the world's most prolific seducer of women, she wishes she did not have to share him quite so widely. His ex-wife, Aggie, a woman with shiny hair and pale milkmaid skin, still has Duncan mow her lawn. His coworker, Jimmy, comes and goes from Duncan's apartment at the most inopportune times. Sometimes Jane wonders if a relationship can even work with three people in it--never mind four. Five if you count Aggie's eccentric husband, Gary. Not to mention all the other residents of Boyne City, who freely share with Jane their opinions of her choices.

But any notion Jane had of love and marriage changes with one terrible car crash. Soon Jane's life is permanently intertwined with Duncan's, Aggie's, and Jimmy's, and Jane knows she will never have Duncan to herself. But could it be possible that a deeper kind of happiness is right in front of Jane's eyes? A novel that is alternately bittersweet and laugh-out-loud funny, Katherine Heiny's Early Morning Riser is her most astonishingly wonderful work to date.

KATHERINE HEINY is the author of Standard Deviation and Single, Carefree, Mellow, and her short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and many other magazines. She lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with her husband and children, and is a former resident of London, The Hague, and Boyne City, Michigan.

"The funniest novel of the year... You have to pay attention to a book like Heiny's... Sweetly sardonic... Delightful." - Bethanne Patrick, The Washington Post

"Katherine Heiny shows readers how to pay attention to the little things... [A] quiet whirlwind of a novel... Heiny writes about small-town life without ridicule or slapstick, and never resorts to idyllic depictions of a long-ago day that never existed... At its heart, this is a serious story full of lightness." - Connie Schultz, The New York Times Book Review

"Early Morning Riser, which unfolds episodically over a period of 17 years, has the makings of a witty romantic comedy that evokes the work of Laurie Colwin... Spot-on descriptions and sharp observations about marriage... Flat-out wonderful--sharp and funny and melancholic in equal measure." - Joanne Kaufman, The Wall Street Journal

"Charming, hilarious... [This] one-of-a-kind story, featuring a cast of quirky characters, is a surefire literary mood boost with a heartwarming reminder of the many ways love appears in our lives." - Real Simple

"Few writers so memorably capture the quirky interior lives of their characters as Heiny... She returns to form with Early Morning Riser, a wry and wise novel about the intertwined romantic lives of the residents of a small Michigan town... Heiny soars in her offbeat examination of small-town baggage and found families." - Esquire

"The perfect pick me-up, filled to the brim with lovable eccentrics and delightful oddballs." - Newsweek