How to be Good - Softcover

Hornby, Nick

3.22

56,420 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 024195018X ISBN 13: 9780241950180

Publisher: Penguin, 2010

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How to be Good is Nick Hornby's hilarious bestselling novel on life, love and charity

'I am in a car park in Leeds when I tell my husband I don't want to be married to him any more. . . '

London GP Katie Carr always thought she was a good person. With her husband David making a living as 'The Angriest Man in Holloway', she figured she could put up with anything. Until, that is, David meets DJ Goodnews and becomes a good person too. A far-too-good person who starts committing crimes of charity like taking in the homeless and giving their kids' toys away. Suddenly Katie's feeling very bad about herself, and thinking that if charity begins at home, then maybe its time to move. . .

This laugh-out-loud novel, from the bestselling author of About a Boy and High Fidelity, will have you gripped from start to finish and will appeal to fans of David Nicholls and Jonathan Coe, as well as readers in need of a moral compass everywhere.

'Pins you in your armchair ad won't let go . . . How to be Good? How to be bloody marvellous, more like' Mail on Sunday

'It does exactly what it says on the cover. Hornby's prose is artful and effortless, his spiky wit as razored as a number-two cut' Independent

'The writing is so funny, and the set-pieces so brilliant...Hornby's best book since Fever Pitch' Lynn Truss, The Times

Nick Hornby has captivated readers and achieved widespread critical acclaim for his comic, well-observed novels About a Boy, A Long Way Down, Juliet, Naked, Slam and High Fidelity. His three works of non-fiction, 31 Songs (shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award), Fever Pitch (winner of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award) and The Complete Polysyllabic Spree are also available from Penguin.

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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, self-styled "Angriest Man in Holloway". But one fateful day, she finds herself in a Leeds car-park, having just slept with another man. What she doesn't yet realise is that her Fall from Grace is just the first step on a spiritual journey more torturous than the M25 at rush-hour. Because, prompted by his wife's actions, David is about to stop being Angry. He's about to become Good--not Guardian-reading, 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.

Mr Hornby fires his central theme at us from the title page: how can we be good, and what does that mean? But, quite apart from demanding that his readers scrub their souls with the nearest available Brillo pad, he also mesmerises us with that cocktail of wit and compassion which has become his trademark. The result is a multi-faceted 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

Review:

Hornby is a writer who dares to be witty, intelligent and emotionally generous all at once. "The New York Times Book Review""

"Hornby is a writer who dares to be witty, intelligent and emotionally generous all at once."--The New York Times Book Review"
A darkly funny and thought-provoking ride."--USA Today

"A bitingly clever novel of ideas...[a] profound, worrying, hilarious, sophisticated, compulsive novel."--The Sunday Times (UK)
"Daringly different."--New York Daily News

"How to be good? How to be bloody marvelous more like."--The Mail on Sunday(UK)
"Breezily hilarious and thought-provoking at the same time."--New York Magazine

"Seriousness spiked with humor...a page-turner."--The Washington Times

"A thorny parable...very funny and shrewd."--Salon.com

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