How to Be Good ++++ A SIGNED & INSCRIBED UK FIRST EDITION & FIRST PRINTING HARDBACK ++++

Nick Hornby

ISBN 10: 0670888230 / ISBN 13: 9780670888238

Published by Viking, UK, 2001

About this Item

A VG+ UK first edition, first printing hardback (light lean and usual tanning to pages) - in a VG unclipped dustjacket (some fading to spine) - All my books are always securely packed with plenty of bubblewrap in professional boxes and promptly dispatched (within 2-3 days) - SIGNED & INSCRIBED BY NICK HORNBY - Pictures available upon request.

Seller Inventory # 011099

Bibliographic Details

• Title: How to Be Good ++++ A SIGNED & INSCRIBED UK FIRST EDITION & FIRST PRINTING HARDBACK ++++
• Publisher: Viking, UK
• Publication Date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0670888230
• ISBN 13: 9780670888238
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)

About this title

Synopsis

First edition, first printing hard cover, with unclipped dust jacket, both in very good condition. Light shelf and handling wear includes minor creasing to DJ edges and tanning to pageblock leading into page edges. Boards are in fine condition, pages tightly bound, content is 'as unread'. CN

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