How to be Good - Softcover

Hornby, Nick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0241969824 ISBN 13: 9780241969823

Publisher: Penguin, 2014

Synopsis

THE MILLION-COPY NO.1 BESTSELLER

'Enormously powerful' Guardian

'Hilarious, sophisticated, compulsive' The Times

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'I am in a car park in Leeds when I tell my husband I don't want to be married to him any more. . . '

London GP Katie Carr always thought she was a good person. With her husband David making a living as 'The Angriest Man in Holloway', she figured she could put up with anything. Until, that is, David meets DJ Goodnews and becomes a good person too. A far-too-good person who starts committing crimes of charity like taking in the homeless and giving their kids' toys away. Suddenly Katie's feeling very bad about herself, and thinking that if charity begins at home, then maybe its time to move. . .

This laugh-out-loud novel, from the bestselling author of About a Boy and High Fidelity, will have you gripped from start to finish and will appeal to fans of David Nicholls and Jonathan Coe, as well as readers in need of a moral compass everywhere.

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'Pins you in your armchair ad won't let go . . . How to be Good? How to be bloody marvellous, more like' Mail on Sunday

'It does exactly what it says on the cover. Hornby's prose is artful and effortless, his spiky wit as razored as a number-two cut' Independent

'The writing is so funny, and the set-pieces so brilliant...Hornby's best book since Fever Pitch' Lynn Truss, The Times

About this title

Review:

In Nick Hornby's How To Be Good, Katie Carr is certainly trying to be. That's why she became a GP. That's why she cares about Third World debt and homelessness, and struggles to raise her children with a conscience. It's also why she puts up with her husband David, self-styled "Angriest Man in Holloway". But one fateful day, she finds herself in a Leeds car-park, having just slept with another man. What she doesn't yet realise is that her Fall from Grace is just the first step on a spiritual journey more torturous than the M25 at rush-hour. Because, prompted by his wife's actions, David is about to stop being Angry. He's about to become Good--not Guardian-reading, organic-food-eating good, but Good in the fashion of the Gospels. And that's no easier in modern-day Holloway than it was in ancient Israel.

Mr Hornby fires his central theme at us from the title page: how can we be good, and what does that mean? But, quite apart from demanding that his readers scrub their souls with the nearest available Brillo pad, he also mesmerises us with that cocktail of wit and compassion which has become his trademark. The result is a multi-faceted jewel of a book: a hilarious romp, a painstaking dissection of middle-class mores, and a powerfully sympathetic portrait of a marriage in its death throes. It's hard to know whether to laugh or cry as we watch David forcing his kids to give away their computers, drawing up schemes for the mass redistribution of wealth and inviting his wife's most desolate patients round for a Sunday roast. But that's because How To Be Good manages to be both brutally truthful and full of hope. It won't outsell the Bible, but it's a lot funnier. --Matthew Baylis

Review:

Hilarious, sophisticated, compulsive . . . a bitingly clever novel of ideas, on a subject almost nobody else has written about - how would a totally good person get on in the modern world? (Sunday Times)

A dark espresso-length comedy that nobody else could have written (New Statesman)

The writing is so funny and the set-pieces so brilliant (The Times)

Perhaps the most poised piece of writing Hornby has yet produced . . . only this writer has the wit and the stringency to take on this easy comedy and draw compelling, even universal pathos from it (Observer)

Brilliantly funny (Heat)

Pins you in your armchair and won't let go . . . How to be Good? How to be bloody marvellous more like (Mail on Sunday)

It does exactly what it says on the cover. Hornby's prose is artful and effortless, his spiky wit as razored as a number-two cut (Independent)

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0241969824
• ISBN 13: 9780241969823
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256