Someone Who Isnt Me

Staff Top Fives

Our booksellers' favorite books of the year!

The kind of book you’d read late at night when you should be sleeping, but are instead lying in a slowly cooling bath, so fixated by the unfolding narrative that you haven't even noticed the discomfort of the steadily dropping degrees. In a way, this lack of ease might actually enhance the reading of this novel, making you feel more like the musician protagonist of this immersive, semi-autobiographical, fever dream. Taking inspiration from Dante's Inferno, this journey through experimental drug rehabilitation becomes almost too vivid, but skirts that fine line perfectly, ultimately delivering catharsis in just the right dose. Never holding back, he relives numerous unsavory memories in unflinching detail, but also stops to convey the beauty he observes, capturing those stored moments that make his survival seem all the more worth fighting for. A novel like this is a reminder that you’ve often got to expose some of the less than pleasing sides of yourself if you’re going to truly tap into the power that art can have. It’s a dirty process, but Rickly proved with this story that he was willing and ready to take us there, and I thank him for that.  Recommended By Nicholas Y., Powells.com

By far one of the best books I have ever read. This is one of those books that you want to tell everyone about because you can’t put it down, but is also so deeply personal that you want to keep it all to yourself. Rickly’s voice is stunningly creative and detailed and the world he has created here is the best modern adaptation I’ve read of any classic, but especially of Dante’s Divine Comedy. I genuinely cannot say enough good things about this book. Recommended By Aster A., Powells.com

Geoff Rickly’s debut novel 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?