Abstract
Emily should be happy. She has a nice husband (even if they rarely speak to each other, let alone sleep in the same bed), two little boys she loves (even if a full night's sleep is a distant memory) - and now, a brand-new house in which they can live out all of the bourgeois fantasies she knows she should be ashamed of. But still she aches for something more.
Enter Alathea and Elliott, their new neighbours, and also parents of two young boys. Alathea is intimidatingly confident and beautiful, but also disarmingly open and friendly. And Elliott … Elliott is intriguing. Dishevelled, talented, charming and a little lost, he seems as fascinated by Emily as she is by him, and soon their friendship has reached an intensity neither of them seem able to control.
As riotously funny as it is painfully moving, this is a novel about disappointment and yearning; about parenting and growing up; and the search for love, meaning and connection.
Enter Alathea and Elliott, their new neighbours, and also parents of two young boys. Alathea is intimidatingly confident and beautiful, but also disarmingly open and friendly. And Elliott … Elliott is intriguing. Dishevelled, talented, charming and a little lost, he seems as fascinated by Emily as she is by him, and soon their friendship has reached an intensity neither of them seem able to control.
As riotously funny as it is painfully moving, this is a novel about disappointment and yearning; about parenting and growing up; and the search for love, meaning and connection.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Harper Collins |
| Number of pages | 416 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9780008444525, 9780008444532 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9780008444501, 9780008444549 |
| Publication status | Published - 13 May 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Research Statement – The Answer To EverythingThe novel began as an intertextual response to Jane Austen’s Emma but transposed to a contemporary setting where intrigues and romance are filtered through technology. As in past fiction works, certain sections loosely respond to the poetry of John Donne, and the plot essentially hinges on a hand-written quote. Building on research into the housing crisis undertaken for my first novel, The Transition, The Answer To Everything presents a seemingly utopian solution in the form of an ‘upcycled’ housing estate providing small affordable homes to an emerging bohemian class with a veneer of aspiration. In this context, the story that played out involved research into the social psychology principle of limerence and the effects of instant messaging, neurologically and socially. It is effectively a means of communication which removes the fourth dimension and allows for instantaneous dialogue which nonetheless allows for forms of social construction and duplicity, less possible before the advent of free and immediate text. (Franz Kafka’s Letters to Milena and Soren Kierkegaard’s The Seducer’s Diary were influential in this respect). Alternating sections of the novel are in the form of message transcripts, corresponding to the form of dialogue with no fixed speaker, or the speaker deliberately uncertain. Taking influence from 20th-21st century practitioners of this form (from James Joyce to Sally Rooney), the no-fixed speaker technique of these sections (which at one point made up the majority of the novel) act as the final twist of the narrative.