Everything You Know
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- €1.99
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- €1.99
Publisher Description
Everything You Know is the first novel from the bestselling author of Notes on a Scandal, Zoe Heller.
The women in Willy Muller's life are trouble.
His mother insists he eat tofu. His dopey girlfriend, Penny, wants him to overcome his personal space issues - while Karen, his other, even dopier, girlfriend, just wants more sex. Meanwhile, his oldest daughter, Sophie, wants him to finance her husband's drug habit.
But it's his youngest daughter, Sadie, who's giving him the biggest headache. Just before committing suicide three months ago, she sent Willy her diaries. Poring over the record of her empty life, he feels pangs of something unexpected . . . remorse. But isn't it a bit late for such sentimental guff?
Set in London, Hollywood and Mexico, Everything You Know is a supremely witty take on love, death and the age-old battle of the sexes.
'Instantly ranks her among the most interesting and exciting of British writers' Will Self
'Sharp and feisty, a riotous read' Tatler
'Fast paced and finely timed, veering from tragedy to farce to back again . . . full of brilliant observations' Harpers and Queen
'Seamlessly blends the sarcastic and the sincere, the comic and the tragic . . . stylish and spirited' New York Times
Zoë Heller is the author of three novels, Everything You Know, Notes on a Scandal, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2003 and The Believers. The 2006 film adaptation of Notes on a Scandal, starring Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench, received four Oscar nominations. She lives in New York.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Willy Muller, the 55-year-old antihero featured in Heller's debut novel, is a hack journalist, absent father, convicted murderer and all-around unsavory character who must come to terms with his past when his teenage daughter Sadie commits suicide. Muller became estranged from Sadie and her older sister, Sophie, when he was imprisoned for murdering his wife and their mother, Oona. After being released on appeal, out of a job and desperate for cash, Muller wrote To Have and To Hold, a lurid confessional novel about his marriage and his wife's death. The book's publication earned him the scorn of friends and family, and Muller fled England for Los Angeles, leaving his two rebellious, emotionally damaged teenage daughters and pursuing a life of feeble ghostwriting and shallow society. The novel opens with Muller recuperating from a heart attack and reevaluating his life with the help of a box of Sadie's diaries, sent to him after her death. Reading the words of his ill-fated daughter, he can no longer deceive himself about his sorry behavior. Muller's intelligent, defensive and increasingly self-aware narration is counteracted poignantly by the heartbreaking voice of young Sadie as she tries, with little help from anybody, to cope with cruel boyfriends, her teen pregnancy and her own baby. Heller, formerly a New Yorker staff member and a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, pulls off this potentially heavy-handed story with great aplomb. She brings out the absurdities and hypocrisy in all the settings visited here--low-rent Hollywood, a resort town in Mexico and working-class London. A genuine but hilarious jerk, Muller abuses and offends a range of characters in all these locales, from his insipid girlfriend, Penny, to his vampiric agent, Art, to his surviving, conniving daughter, Sophie. But proving that faith can be just as interesting as cynicism, Heller gives her characters a few hard-earned moments of reckoning.
