All's Well
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4.6 • 5 Ratings
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
"A dazzling wild ride of a novel – daring, fresh, entertaining, and magical. Mona Awad is a powerful and poetic storyteller, telling us something new and profound here about the connection between suffering and elation. When I was away from this book, I longed to get back to it." — George Saunders, New York Times bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo
"Wild and exhilarating and so fresh it takes your breath away, All's Well is an utterly delicious novel of pain and vitality, Shakespeare and the uncanny, and our own subtle moral failures when we brush up against the pain of others. Mona Awad's talent is so vital that it absolutely roars out of her. " — Lauren Groff, New York Times bestselling author of Fates and Furies
"Tragic, macabre, and wicked. I laughed out loud the whole way through. One of the funniest books I’ve read in years." — Heather O'Neill, author of The Lonely Hearts Hotel
"Really funny ... The satirical targets, all brilliantly hit, include useless physios, entitled students, internet advertising and — for all you romantics out there — love!" Wendy Holden in the Daily Mail
Longlisted for the 2023 Dublin Literary Award
Miranda Fitch’s life is a waking nightmare. The accident that ended her burgeoning acting career left her with excruciating, chronic back pain, a failed marriage, and a deepening dependence on painkillers. And now she’s on the verge of losing her job as a college theater director. Determined to put on Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, the play that promised, and cost, her everything, she faces a mutinous cast hellbent on staging Macbeth instead. Miranda sees her chance at redemption slip through her fingers.
That’s when she meets three strange benefactors who have an eerie knowledge of Miranda’s past and a tantalizing promise for her future: one where the show goes on, her rebellious students get what’s coming to them, and the invisible, doubted pain that’s kept her from the spotlight is made known.
With prose Margaret Atwood has described as “no punches pulled, no hilarities dodged...genius,” Mona Awad has concocted her most potent, subversive novel yet. All’s Well is the story of a woman at her breaking point and a formidable, piercingly funny indictment of our collective refusal to witness and believe female pain.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The pill-addled theater professor at the center of Awad's scathing if underwhelming latest (after Bunny) is nearing the end of her rope. Miranda Fitch passes her days in a self-medicated haze, numbing the debilitating pain she's felt since falling off the stage in a production of Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well. Worse still, no one seems to believe the severity of her condition. After the cast of her student production insists on putting on Macbeth rather than All's Well, Miranda is approached at a bar by three mysterious men who give her the ability to transfer her pain to others. In the first instance, she wrests a script from a mutinous student, who then clutches her wrist in pain where Miranda touched her. Eventually, Miranda's elation at escaping her pain gives way to a dangerously vindictive, manic spiral. Awad's novel is, like Miranda says about Shakespeare's All's Well, "neither a tragedy nor a comedy, something in between." Unfortunately, it falls short on both counts: Miranda's acerbic inner monologue reaches for humor but mostly misses, and the overwrought tone undermines the story's tragedy (when asked why she wanted to teach at the college: "I thought: Because my dreams have been killed. Because this is the beginning of my end"). It's an ambitious effort, but not one that pays off.
