Hornby has a stellar reputation as a writer of darkly funny, piercingly insightful books such as High Fidelity and About a Boy, but I found my first foray into his world to be a trifle disappointing. This novel is about a white, middle-class, British doctor, wife and mother who is trying to hold onto the life she has constructed while at the same time trying to figure out what that life means, if anything. Her cynical, angry husband undergoes a radical conversion at the hands of a mysterious, twenty-something faith healer called Good News and suddenly must live a “good” life, which means taking in homeless street children and giving his children’s toys to orphans, among other things.

His wife – who is on the verge of divorce, anyway – is puzzled, distressed and embarrassed by her husband’s sudden transformation and the changes that has brought, most notably moving Good News into the spare bedroom. But more than that, she is distraught because she so desperately wants to be good – she is a doctor, she keeps reminding us – but she can’t figure out what to do to help all the people who need healing while still holding onto her comfortable, safe life. It is the same dilemma that many of us WASPs face, although we don’t let the guilt completely consume us, as she does (otherwise, we’d all go as crazy as she does).

In the end, the novel doesn’t offer much hope – not for doing good or changing the world, not for sustaining marriage, not for doing much more than surviving in what amounts to an endlessly cruel world. Bit of a downer, if you ask me, and not at all satisfying, but still the book is well written enough and the characters engaging enough to earn a weak recommendation.

My friend go this for me as a christmas present, I’ve liked the other books by Nick Hornby so I’m really looking forward to this.