Here Goes Nothing

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What to expect

A firecracker of a novel by the Booker-shortlisted author of A Fraction of the Whole - a scathingly funny and affecting tale of life, death, love and the questionable existence of God.

Angus Mooney is not happy - he's been murdered, cut off in the prime of his life. He feels humiliated - he's never even believed in an afterlife. (How wrong he'd been). He's confused - death has provided more questions than answers. And he desperately misses his audacious and fiery wife, Gracie, who's expecting their first child.

The only upside is that Angus has found a way to see what his murderer is up to, and how Gracie is faring. The downside: Gracie and his murderer are getting uncomfortably close, and a worldwide pandemic means the afterlife is about to get very crowded . . .

'What a joy to surrender oneself to a writer of such prodigious talent' Peter Carey

(P) 2022 Hodder & Stoughton Limited

Critics Review

  • Steve Toltz’s fabulously impressive third novel cannonballs straight into heady existential questions, magicking up a vision of human life at once generous and absurd while wearing its considerable ambition lightly . . . Toltz takes his time with each book and Here Goes Nothing is a funny, clever, entertaining argument in favour of cultivating the patience to get it right.

    Guardian
  • A morbidly two-fisted tour de force . . . energetically full of sardonic one-liners . . . it reeks of mortality, but it is thoroughly bracing.

    Sunday Times
  • Savagely comic . . . Here Goes Nothing is a Jeremiad with jokes . . . But when the story focuses on the end of days on Earth, Toltz abandons existential standup for the detailed horror of what we all might have faced if Covid had triumphed. Wider questions persist about what it means to be alive.

    Spectator
  • In his three books (alas, too few) Steve Toltz has shown that he is one of the funniest and most original writers at work today.

    The Times
  • Toltz refreshingly posits an afterlife without any religious scaffolding . . . He conjures up scenes few other novelists would dare to imagine, let alone write . . . In a book full of narrative tricks, Toltz saves the best, or strangest, for last.

    Financial Times
  • Steve Toltz’s first two novels . . . were filled to the brim with exuberant sentences, dark jokes, large philosophical ideas and wildly imaginative, often lurid incidents . . . Now, with Here Goes Nothing he pulls off the same trick again . . . While Toltz obviously has a serious purpose – to rub our noses in what a mess we’ve collectively made of being alive – his usual high quotient of fizzing one-liners ensures that not many pages go by without at least one laugh

    The Times

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