Here Goes Nothing
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3.4 • 7 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A Times (of London) Best Fiction Book of 2022
A wildly inventive, savagely funny and topical novel about love, mortality and the afterlife, by the Booker-shortlisted author of A Fraction of the Whole.
Angus is a reformed ne'er-do-well looking forward to the birth of his first child when he's murdered by a man who is in love with his pregnant wife Gracie. Having never believed in God, heaven or hell, Angus finds himself in the afterlife - a place that provides more questions than answers. As a worldwide pandemic finally reaches the shores of Australia, the afterlife starts to get very crowded and Angus finds a way to reconnect with his wife Gracie and maybe even seek revenge on his murderer...
Here Goes Nothing is a novel of exhilarating originality and scope about birth, death and everything in between and after by ‘a writer of prodigious talent’ (Peter Carey) that contains a vision of the afterlife that rivals Dante’s Divine Comedy and George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo, and the emmy-nominated The Good Place.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The clever latest from Toltz (Quicksand) follows a hapless husband who discovers that the afterlife is a bewildering, bureaucratic bore. Angus Mooney excels only at petty crime, laziness, and loving his pregnant wife, Gracie, a quirky wedding officiant. Despite their marital bliss, the couple is perennially short on cash, so when a stranger dying of brain disease offers to make Angus and Gracie his heirs in exchange for letting him die in their house, they agree. Shortly after the stranger moves in, he murders Angus, sending him to a banal afterlife, where he works at an umbrella factory and his fellow citizens complain of housing shortages and an ill-defined ongoing war. Finding death too much like life and missing Gracie, Angus becomes addicted to a machine that allows him to haunt his old home. He observes the dying man trying to seduce Gracie, who remains ignorant of how Angus really died, and he learns about the spread of a lethal virus that threatens to overwhelm the afterlife. Toltz's wit and black humor transform a morbid premise into a rollicking ride. The result is an audaciously creative imagining of what awaits after death.
