Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Nick Hornby-How To Be Good


Humorous novel


'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?

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