'Listen, I'm not a bad person. I'm a doctor. One of the reasons I wanted to become a doctor was because I thought it would be a good - as in Good rather than exciting or well-paid or glamorous - thing to do … Anyway, I'm a good person, a doctor, and I'm lying in a hotel bed with a man I don't really know very well called Stephen, and I've just asked my husband for a divorce.'
According to her own complex moral calculations, Katie Carr has earned her affair. She's a doctor, after all, and doctors are decent people, and on top of that her husband David is the self-styled Angriest Man in Holloway. When David suddenly becomes good, however - properly, maddeningly, give-away-all-his-money good - Katie's sums no longer add up, and she is forced to ask herself some very hard questions …
Nick Hornby's brilliant third novel offers a painfully funny account of modern marriage and parenthood, and asks that most difficult of questions: what does it mean to be good?
'Hilarious, sophisticated, compulsive'
Sunday Times
'Vintage Nick Hornby. Very funny and very clever, and packed with wit and brilliance'
Spectator
'Pins you in your armchair and won't let you go. Eating, drinking, bathing - all took second place while I was reading the book. How to be Good? How to be bloody marvellous, more like'
Mail on Sunday
'The writing is so funny, and the set-pieces so brilliant … This is Hornby's best book since Fever Pitch'
Lynne Truss, The Times
'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?'
John Carey, Sunday Times
'I loved this book'
Julie Burchill, Mail on Sunday |
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Buy How To Be Good
Washington Post interview, from 2001, around publication of HTBG
Readers' Club of America interview, about HTBG
Spike Magazine interview, mainly about HTBG
Commonwealth Club Awards interview |
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