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Staff Pick
Follow a theater professor as she struggles to prevent her chronic pain from consuming her. Miranda is presented with a way to inflict rather than receive pain, and is driven mad with her new power. Awad is an expert in creating an all-consuming narrative. Recommended By Kyra R, Powells.com
All's Well is a swirling, intoxicating, otherworldy story about chronic pain, power imbalances, and the theatre. While putting on one of Shakespeare's problem plays, Miranda Fitz has an encounter with a mysterious trio that magically cures her debilitating pain (at a cost), and sets her on a dizzying path toward opening night and protecting her newfound lightness. It's dark, it's comedic, it's surreal and relatable — it's Mona Awad at her very best. Recommended By Michelle C., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
From the author of Bunny ("
genius"(Margaret Atwood)), comes a dazzling and darkly funny novel about a theater professor who is convinced staging Shakespeare's most maligned play will remedy all that ails her — but at what cost?
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF SUMMER 2021 SELECTED BY * ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY * VULTURE * LITHUB * REFINERY29 * GOODREADS * POPSUGAR * NOW MAGAZINE * BOSTON * AND MORE
"A dazzling wild ride of a novel--daring, fresh, entertaining, and magical." —GEORGE SAUNDERS
"Wild and exhilarating and so fresh it takes your breath away." —LAUREN GROFF
"Oh my lord what a fabulous novel — knocked me out " —MARY KARR
Miranda Fitch's life is a waking nightmare. The accident that ended her burgeoning acting career left her with excruciating, chronic back pain, a failed marriage, and a deepening dependence on painkillers. And now she's on the verge of losing her job as a college theater director. Determined to put on Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well, the play that promised, and cost, her everything, she faces a mutinous cast hellbent on staging Macbeth instead. Miranda sees her chance at redemption slip through her fingers.
That's when she meets threezstrange benefactors who have an eerie knowledge of Miranda's past and a tantalizing promise for her future: one where the show goes on, her rebellious students get what's coming to them, and the invisible, doubted pain that's kept her from the spotlight is made known.
With prose Margaret Atwood has described as "no punches pulled, no hilarities dodged...genius," Mona Awad has concocted her most potent, subversive novel yet. All's Well is the story of a woman at her breaking point and a formidable, piercingly funny indictment of our collective refusal to witness and believe female pain.
Review
"A brilliant noir comedy about art and illness....Awad's characters are deliciously over the top and impossible to forget, as is the author's gift for morbid humor....Endlessly thought-provoking and not to be missed." Booklist (Starred Review)
Review
"In this eerie and engrossing novel, Mona Awad deftly delivers a narrator as mesmerizing as she is unreliable. Miranda's quest for her heart's desires illuminates the complex bargains one woman dares to make in her most desperate moments. With its mordant humor and potent surreality, All's Well is a gripping read, and Awad is a writer of great intensity and insight." Helen Phillips, author of The Need
Review
"For all my fellow right-thinking adoring readers of Bunny, another dark and insane gem from Mona Awad, full of scintillating insights on Shakespeare, pain, and the human condition." Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot , finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Review
"Tragic, macabre, and wicked. I laughed out loud the whole way through. One of the funniest books I've read in years." Heather O'neill, author of The Lonely Hearts Hotel
About the Author
Mona Awad is the author of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and winner of the Amazon Canada First Novel Award and Bunny, named a Best Book of 2019 by Time, Vogue, and The New York Public Library , a finalist for the New England Book Award, and currently in development as an AMC series written by Megan Mostyn-Brown. She has published work in The New York Times Magazine, Time, VICE, Electric Literature, McSweeney's, and elsewhere. She begins teaching fiction fall 2020 in the MFA program at Syracuse. Awad currently lives in Boston.