Games and Rituals by Katherine Heiny (HC)

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.

REVIEWS

"Heiny has the comic writer’s knack of taking a character’s idiosyncrasies (…) and making them joyfully relatable. (And she can say more in a pithy parenthesis than many writers manage in a page.) She has a genius for spinning universality out of the absurdly specific." -The Guardian

"Superb… as near perfection as, say, Donald Trump is far from it… Heiny is habitually congratulated for writing feelgood stories, but if these pointed, satirical, emotionally ruthless takes on humanity merely made me feel good, I wouldn’t value them half as much." - The Times 

"For any reader yet to encounter Katherine Heiny, this sparky new story collection provides a joyous introduction…The deadpan delivery, the bittersweet wisdom, the sublime farce – it’s all here." - The Observer 

PRODUCT DETAILS
Hardcover Edition
Publisher: Fourth Estate
ISBN: 978-0008395148
Pages:  240