Early Sobrieties

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

Early Sobrieties is a miracle, a debut of startling beauty, grit, and grace. Cutting into the glow of its lyricism and humor, the awesome glare of undeceived vision illuminates every page

Greg Jackson, author of The Dimensions of a Cave

Funny, insightful, and, above all, well-written, Early Sobrieties is a pleasure to read. Deagler manages to tell the story of his bewildered and rudderless protagonist in a way that is not rudderless at all, but rather precise and meaningful

David Sanchez, author of All Day is a Long Time

Superb . . . Deagler is very good. His prose is conversational and vivid; his characters talk and act like real people, in constantly surprising and plausible ways; and everything that happens, no matter how low-key or incidental to the plot, has the detailed intricacy of ordinary life

Benjamin Markovits, Telegraph

Monk is an ideal vehicle for Deagler's fine observational skills . . . refreshing. Early Sobrieties marks the arrival of a writer of considerable gifts . . . His dialogue is as crisp as a virgin mojito and his prose has the buoyant energy of a hangover-free Saturday morning

Matt Rowland Hill, TLS

All we have is Monk's peripatetic wanderings and the pleasure of his voice, which is consistently funny and wise . . . There's a sense of dislocation or dissociation in this recovering addict's observations, which Deagler perfectly articulates . . . What makes the novel cohere, and what makes it such a pleasure, is Monk's stream-clear voice and his growing insight into his condition.

Jude Cook, The Spectator

This warm and witty novel has a fresh take on the pressures facing Generation Z, and the inevitability of the quarter-life crisis

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