So Much For That

by Lionel Shriver

What do you pack for the rest of your life? The explosive new novel from the Orange Prize-winning author of We Need to Talk About Kevin

Shepherd Knacker has been saving all his working life for a one way ticket away from the daily grind. When he sells his handyman business for $1million, ‘The Afterlife’ seems tantalisingly within reach. Yet his wife has concocted one reason after another why now isn’t the time to go. Determined to take the plunge, Shep announces that he is leaving for an island off the coast of Tanzania: with or without her. However, Glynis has an announcement of her own – she needs his health insurance.

Illustrating how a marriage is both stressed and strengthened by medical crisis, So Much for That puts the uncomfortable fiscal question: how much is one life worth? Enlivened by Shriver’s signature acerbity and political outrage, it’s surely the funniest and most entertaining novel about illness and death one’s ever likely to read.

(From Publisher).

Lionel Shriver is the author of nine novels, as well as a journalist for the Guardian, the New York Times, and the Daily Telegraph, among many other publications. An international bestseller, We Need to Talk About Kevin won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2005, and has been translated into more than twenty languages. A New York Times bestseller, Time magazine top-ten pick of 2007, Entertainment Weekly's Book of the Year and rising to number two on the Canadian bestseller list, The Post-Birthday World has already secured ten foreign translation deals. Lionel lives in London and New York City.

So Much for That is a novel about the devastating effect of illness on human relationships. It is also a savage indictment of the current US health care system. The central question of how much a human life is actually worth, is thoughtfully, unswervingly and sometimes angrily examined.