Nicky Pellegrino

THERE ARE SO MANY reasons to love Early Morning Riser by Katherine Heiny. It’s bittersweet, witty and wise, quirky and wonderful, but most of all, it’s emotionally authentic. This is a story about life and love in a small town. Jane moves to Boyne City, Michigan, to work as a schoolteacher. There, she falls in love with amiable and handsome woodworker Duncan. Unfortunately, Duncan has slept with pretty much every available woman in town and remains closely bound to his dauntingly perfect ex-wife. When a single event shatters Jane’s life, she discovers how friends can become your family, and how sometimes they need you as much as you need them.

I also really loved Heiny’s previous novel Standard Deviation, and am looking forward to her new volume of short stories out next month, Games & Rituals. I have an aversion to overwritten, flowery, densely descriptive prose and her writing is the opposite – pithy and powerful, elegantly simple. She has such an observant eye and an original take when it comes to relationships. It’s a rare writer that can make you laugh and cry almost in a single sentence.

Her work reminds me of Anne Tyler’s

A Spool of Blue Thread or another recent favourite, We All Want Impossible Things, by Catherine Newman. They’re all stories that touch you and stay with you, that have a lot of heart.

Also, Heiny’s books tend to be quite slender volumes so I can read them in bed without aggravating the arthritis in my thumb I developed during The Luminaries. ▮

Nicky Pellegrino’s latest novel, PS Come to Italy (Hachette), is out now. For details of her bookshop tour, see hachette.co.nz/whats-on/ event-nicky-pellegrino-book-launch/