Early Sobrieties

By: Michael Deagler

Narrated by: Alex Mortensen

Brought to you by Penguin.

Dennis Monk is about to spend his first summer sober. At twenty-six he is ready to re-join sensible adult life, but just when Dennis needs stability, his uptight parents kick him out into a world of couch-surfing.

Everything around him has changed and everyone he knows seems to be doing better than he is. At every street corner, former classmates, estranged drinking buddies, and prospective lovers threaten to burst the bubble of his recovery. And Dennis Monk is about to learn the difference between getting sober and staying sober in this new world.

Early Sobrieties is a devastatingly witty novel about coming of age a second time. Deagler’s debut marks the arrival of an astonishing new voice in American fiction.

©2024 Michael Deagler (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

Michael Deagler is the real deal. This novel is surprising in all the best ways. The actions of the complex and complicated people in this world are not predictable, but always, frighteningly, believable. Deagler writes with great control and understatement. This is a truly intelligent work from a clearly intelligent writer (Percival Everett, 2023 Windham Campbell Prize recipient and author of Dr. No)

Illuminating and moving—Deagler’s debut pulls in a reader with such an inviting clarity. There’s something about the honesty in this voice that creates a lot of room for the reader to connect, imagine, and feel (Aimee Bender, author of The Butterfly Lampshade)

This is a funny, sad but – first of all – incredibly soulful novel. It offers an unflinching account of the life which has to be lived in the aftermath of a change of heart. Here is a narrator who is clear-eyed and yet sun-dazzled; born again but as an actual newborn. It will literally make you laugh and it will literally make you cry. (Aidan Cottrell-Boyce, author of The End of Nightwork)

Emotionally raw, often jaded, but still full of wonder, Early Sobrieties is an incredibly funny and tender story. Michael Deagler does a fantastic job of bringing into relief the absurdities of being a young adult and trying to find your place in a changing world (Craig Finn, songwriter and frontman of The Hold Steady)

A luminous and observant debut about all the strangeness of returning to the places that formed you. The prose is spectacular (Akil Kumarasamy, author of Meet Us by the Roaring Sea)