"‘Superb’
THE TIMES
‘Joyous’
THE OBSERVER
The beloved author of Early Morning Riser brings us eleven glittering stories of love – friendships formed at the airport bar, ex-husbands with benefits, mothers of suspiciously sweet teenagers, ill-advised trysts – in all its forms, both ridiculous and sublime.
The games and rituals performed by Katherine Heiny’s characters range from mischievous to tender. In ‘Bridesmaid, Revisited,’ Marilee, suffering from a laundry and life crisis, wears a massive bridesmaid’s dress to work. In ‘Twist and Shout,’ Ericka’s elderly father mistakes his four-thousand-dollar hearing aid for a cashew and eats it. 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 and is forced to help her husband’s ex-wife move out of the family home.
From one of our most celebrated writers, our bard of waking up in the wrong bed, wearing the wrong shoes, late for the wrong job, but loved by the right people, Katherine Heiny has delivered a work of glorious humour and immense kindness."
"‘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 Duncan: 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."
"‘I have rarely seen modern marriage reproduced so faithfully in print. It’s about love once the early romance has subsided. Hilarious’ Jojo Moyes, Woman and Home
‘Standard Deviation is a marvel’ Kate Atkinson
‘Addictive reading’ Mail on Sunday
‘A comic masterpiece’ Observer
A divinely funny novel about the challenges of a good marriage, the delight and heartache of raising children, and the irresistible temptation to wonder about the path not taken.
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 wonderful story collection from the author of Standard Deviation
‘Heiny's work does something magical: gives women's interior lives the gravity they so richly deserve and makes you laugh along the way’ Lena Dunham
‘Like Cheever mixed with Ephron’ New York Times
‘Simply wonderful, I savoured every page’ Guardian
Maya’s dog is dying, and she is planning to leave her boyfriend. On the whole she feels worse about the dog.
Nina thought it might be difficult to summon the moral fortitude to have an extramarital affair with a Presbyterian minister living above the garbage, but she discovers that almost anything is possible.
A teenager finds an affair with her history teacher too sealed off from the rest of her life, like the last slice of cake under a glass dome.
These women are best friends, roommates and mistresses. They tipple and titillate, fantasize and fumble, worry and wander. They make poor choices in men and children’s magicians and wise choices in what to wear to meet their lovers’ wives. None of them are single (or carefree or mellow) but all are irresistible and all too familiar."
