The First Taste: A Novel

"You don't need to have grown up Mormon to understand what Drew and Greg are carrying. You just need to have loved someone at the wrong time—or in the wrong way." —Goodreads

It’s 1999. Drew Amsel is eighteen and waiting—for his Mormon mission, for his life to begin, for something he can't quite name. Then Iris appears, his best friend's younger sister, and the waiting becomes something else entirely.

The First Taste is a novel about the year before departure: the friends and siblings who once made the world feel permanent vanishing one by one; a love that arrives at the wrong moment; a best friend whose hidden life will cost him everything; and a faith that names desire a sin and sacrifice the highest form of love. Set against the extraordinary landscape of the Utah foothills—the canyons, the rivers, the mountains—before crossing continents to the cathedrals and cafés of London and Paris, it is a story about love at the edge of adulthood and the experiences that shape us.

"Announces the arrival of a significant literary voice...Vogel has written a novel that is funny and tender and rigorously honest, that takes American faith seriously as a subject without sentimentalizing or condemning it, and that renders first love with a precision that is all the more affecting for its restraint." —Medium