Geoff Rickly Announces New Book

Thursday

Geoff Rickly will release Someone Who Isn’t Me on July 25th.

Geoff Rickly, best known as the lead singer of Thursday, No Devotion, and United Nations, is set to release his debut novel Someone Who Isn’t Me on July 25, 2023 via Rose Books, the new independent press run by writer Chelsea Hodson. A fictional novel based on Geoff’s real-life experience at an ibogaine clinic in Mexico, Someone Who Isn’t Me is a feverish journey through the psyche of someone who no longer recognizes himself. When Geoff hears that a drug called ibogaine might be able to save him from his heroin addiction, he goes to a clinic in Mexico to confront the darkest and most destructive versions of himself. In this modern reimagining of the Divine Comedy, survival lurks in the darkest corners of Geoff’s brain, asking, will he make it? Can anyone? 

Someone Who Isn’t Me will be available for pre-order on the Rose Books website starting onJanuary 30, 2023 available simultaneously in a paperback edition as well as a limited-edition clothbound hardcover edition. 

More praise for Someone Who Isn’t MeSomeone Who Isn’t Me is a special kind of contraband. In this hallucinatory debut, Geoff Rickly explores the dazzling and tragic allure of hard drugs. Rickly takes us on a spikey journey through the human psyche of a man who knows the world intimately, but no longer recognises himself in it. An outstanding debut, thrilling, fierce and hallucinatory. A book to shake your soul out.” —Colum McCann

“Sending currents of deep, humane wit through its vortices of imagination, Someone Who Isn’t Me is a wild, hypnotic ride that makes a lasting music of the holy and the diabolical. An incandescent debut. I think it rewired my neural pathways.” — Hermione Hoby, author of Virtue

"The modern literary novel is often a vapid fantasy, the author’s best guess as to what a lived life feels like. Someone Who Isn’t Me is the opposite. This is honey spilled on sandpaper. The pages are blistered and stained and tactile and true, they reek, they weep, they vomit, they scream. This book is a gift and a warning, an effigy for the living: Rickly performed an autopsy on himself and these are the coroner’s notes.” — Sam Tallent

"This is the most compelling piece of writing I’ve read in a long time—bizarre, beautiful, mind-bending, and indelible. Every element in this book is wildly inventive and impactful, from its rollercoaster plot to the stripped-bare vulnerability. Rickly has written a new classic.” — Juliet Escoria

“Raw nerve, live wire, blisteringly psychoactive. This novel will set your mind racing, kick your heart into highest gear.” — Bud Smith 

"A seasick, lyrical book. Take a ride with this gorgeous mind—there’s no other like it, except your own. This work is a poetic and hard-won example of how we can grow up.” — Amy Rose Spiegel