Everything You Need

Nathan Staples is consumed by loathing and love in roughly equal measures. Frustrated by his life and the way he lives it, he is sustained only by his passionate devotion for his estranged wife and their teenage daughter, Mary - whom he hasn’t seen in fifteen years, and who thinks he’s dead. When Nathan contrives to have Mary invited to the island where he lives in retreat, he sets in motion the possibility of telling her he is her father, and becoming whole and complete and alive again.

With this third novel, A.L. Kennedy has written a work of something approaching genius - its surface brightly strewn with turmoil and damage, its depths profound and turbulent. A brilliant examination of human frailty, cut through with bitter, helpless comedy and agonizing grief, it is a novel about a man who has nothing, a man who will only be healed when he finds the lost Grail he once held in his hands - the ability to give and receive love.