Early Morning Riser: A novel

A wise, bighearted, boundlessly joyful novel of love, disaster, and unconventional family from the celebrated author (“like Cheever mixed with Ephron” per The New York Times Book Review) of Standard Deviation.

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 and 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 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, not to mention most of the other residents of Boyne City, who freely share with Jane their opinions of her choices.

But any notion Jane has of love and marriage changes with one terrible car crash. 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.

About the Author

KATHERINE HEINY is the author of Standard Deviation and Single, Carefree, Mellow. 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.

Author Residence: Bethesda, Maryland