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A wildly inventive, savagely funny and topical novel about love, mortality and the afterlife, by the Booker-shortlisted author of A Fraction of the Whole.
Angus is a reformed ne'er-do-well looking forward to the birth of his first child when he's murdered by a man who is in love with his pregnant wife Gracie. Having never believed in God, heaven or hell, Angus finds himself in the afterlife - a place that provides more questions than answers. As a worldwide pandemic finally reaches the shores of Australia, the afterlife starts to get very crowded and Angus finds a way to reconnect with his wife Gracie and maybe even seek revenge on his murderer...
Here Goes Nothing is a novel of exhilarating originality and scope about birth, death and everything in between and after by ‘a writer of prodigious talent’ (Peter Carey) that contains a vision of the afterlife that rivals Dante’s Divine Comedy and George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo, and the emmy-nominated The Good Place.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
May 3, 2022 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781612199726
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781612199726
- File size: 922 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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March 14, 2022
The clever latest from Toltz (Quicksand) follows a hapless husband who discovers that the afterlife is a bewildering, bureaucratic bore. Angus Mooney excels only at petty crime, laziness, and loving his pregnant wife, Gracie, a quirky wedding officiant. Despite their marital bliss, the couple is perennially short on cash, so when a stranger dying of brain disease offers to make Angus and Gracie his heirs in exchange for letting him die in their house, they agree. Shortly after the stranger moves in, he murders Angus, sending him to a banal afterlife, where he works at an umbrella factory and his fellow citizens complain of housing shortages and an ill-defined ongoing war. Finding death too much like life and missing Gracie, Angus becomes addicted to a machine that allows him to haunt his old home. He observes the dying man trying to seduce Gracie, who remains ignorant of how Angus really died, and he learns about the spread of a lethal virus that threatens to overwhelm the afterlife. Toltz’s wit and black humor transform a morbid premise into a rollicking ride. The result is an audaciously creative imagining of what awaits after death. -
April 1, 2022
Stuck in a dystopian afterlife, a murdered man cracks wise but finds new depths of emotion. Angus Mooney, a petty criminal with a "sneering contempt for the supernatural," finds the joke is on him when he is murdered by a malevolent house guest and lands in a dreary, bureaucratic purgatory. Rules, shortages, and confusion prevail; it doesn't help that he somehow missed afterlife orientation. From the great beyond Angus lovingly haunts his wife, the cynical yet life-affirming Gracie, and fumes about the murderer now sharing her bed. But his predicament and everyone else's worsen when a global pandemic decimates life on Earth, creating a "transdimensional refugee crisis" in the afterlife. Toltz (Quicksand, 2015) revels in the irony of an afterlife skeptic forced into a ghastly second act. Angus' narration is thick with zingy one-liners pointing up the absurdity of it all. But this is less a novel of ideas than an exploration of big feels, among them the slow-spreading dread of societal cataclysm, the grief of watching one's beloved embrace a new partner, and the fear that now may be as good as it gets.COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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