How to be Good (Penguin Street Art) - Softcover

Nick Hornby

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0241965470 ISBN 13: 9780241965474

Publisher: Penguin, 2013

Synopsis

'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 . . . PENGUIN STREET ART: Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd / Armadillo by William Boyd/ And The Ass Saw the Angel by Nick Cave / What a Carve Up by Jonathan Coe/ Americana by Don DeLillo/ Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris/ The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid/ The Believers by Zoe Heller/ How to Be Good by Nick Hornby/ Lights out for the Territory by Iain Sinclair

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, the self-styled Angriest Man in Holloway. But one fateful day, she finds herself in a Leeds parking lot, having just slept with another man. What Katie doesn't yet realize is that her fall from grace is just the first step on a spiritual journey more torturous than the interstate at rush hour. Because, prompted by his wife's actions, David is about to stop being angry. He's about to become good--not politically correct, 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.

Hornby means us to take his title literally: How can we be good, and what does that mean? However, quite apart from demanding that his readers scrub their souls with the nearest available Brillo pad, he also mesmerizes us with that cocktail of wit and compassion that has become his trademark. The result is a multifaceted 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

About the Author

Nick Hornby is the author of six bestselling novels (High Fidelity, About a Boy, How To Be Good, A Long Way Down, Juliet, Naked and Funny Girl), as well as a novel for young adults, Slam, and four works of acclaimed non-fiction: Fever Pitch, 31 Songs, The Complete Polysyllabic Spree and Stuff I've Been Reading. He has written the screenplays for the films Fever Pitch, Wild, Brooklyn and An Education, which was nominated for an Oscar. He lives in Highbury, north London.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0241965470
• ISBN 13: 9780241965474
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 246