Everything You Need - Hardcover

Kennedy, A. L.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 037540791X ISBN 13: 9780375407918

Publisher: Knopf, 2001

Synopsis

Nathan Staples is a man in pain, consumed by loathing and love in roughly equal measures. Frustrated and appalled by his life and the way he lives it, he is sustained only by his passionate devotion to his estranged wife, Maura, and their teenage daughter, Mary—whom he hasn’t seen in fifteen years, and who thinks he’s dead. When Nathan contrives to have Mary invited to the island where he lives in retreat, he sets in motion the possibility of telling her he is her father, and of becoming whole and complete and alive again.

The path to grace, though, is strewn with obstacles and challenges. The obsessive island dwellers are trying to cure themselves through trial by extremity while, over in London, Nathan’s editor, only friend and one link with his literary career—the brilliant, loyal, hopeless Jack—is drinking himself into the ground. And Mary is torn emotionally between familial love for the two uncles who brought her up in loco parentis and the beginnings of a romantic, sexual life beyond.

With her new novel, A. L. Kennedy has written a work of something approaching genius—its surface bright with turmoil and damage, its depths profound and turbulent. A brilliant examination of human frailty, cut through with bitter, helpless comedy and agonizing grief, Everything You Need is a novel about a man who has nothing, a man who will be healed only when he finds the lost grail he once held in his hands: the ability to give and receive love.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

digiously talented A. L. Kennedy comes a flamboyantly stylish and fiercely emotional novel about fathers and daughters, creation and self-destruction, and love’s paradoxical power to heal its most devastated victims. One such victim is Nathan Staples, a writer whose hilarious contempt for humanity is surpassed only by his corrosive self-loathing. Along with five equally dysfunctional colleagues Nathan lives on an island retreat off the coast of Wales, where he yearns for the daughter he lost years before. Now, in defiance of all his hopes, Mary Lamb–herself an aspiring writer–is about to join him as the seventh member of the colony.

As Nathan tortuously wins the trust of the child who has no inkling of their true relationship, Mary comes to a gradual understanding of her gift. In Everything You Need, A. L. Kennedy combines the mythic resonance of Arthurian legend with a sensibility as lyrical as it is profane.

From the Back Cover

“A writer rich in the humanity and warmth that seem at a premium in these bleak times.”
—Salman Rushdie

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 037540791X
• ISBN 13: 9780375407918
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 560