Raw-edged and whippet-thin, Sirens swings from tales of bawdy addiction to charged moments of a father struggling to stay clean. Mohr's prose is lean and scrappy--a featherweight boxer that packs a punch." --Los Angeles Times
With vulnerability, grit, and hard-won humor, acclaimed novelist Joshua Mohr returns with his first book-length work of non-fiction, a raw and big-hearted chronicle of substance abuse, relapse, and family compassion.
Sirens provides a harrowing and complicated account of Mohr's years of substance abuse and culpability. Employing the characterization and chimerical prose for which he has been lauded, Mohr leaves no rock from his sordid past un-turned, from his childhood swilling fuzzy navels as a latch-key kid, through the black-outs and fist-fights, his first failed marriage to his path to sobriety, through the birth of his daughter and the three strokes he suffers in his thirties that reveal he has a literal hole in his heart.
Sirens is a spectacularly moving tome of honesty and emotion from one of our most gifted contemporary writers.
Sirens is one of those books you open thinking to check out a few pages, only to find yourself putting everything else on hold so you don't have to put it down. It's that good. --Los Angeles Review of Books