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.
Steve Toltz was born in Sydney, Australia. A Fraction of the Whole, his first novel, was published in 2008 to widespread critical acclaim and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize as well as the Guardian First Book Award. His equally acclaimed second novel Quicksand was published by Sceptre in 2015. He currently lives in Los Angeles.
Title: Here Goes Nothing
Author: Toltz, Steve
ISBN: 9781529371574
Binding:
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Publication Date: 2022-05-03
Number of Pages: 384
Weight: 0.5902 kg
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. -- Rob Doyle * Guardian *
A morbidly two-fisted tour de force . . . energetically full of sardonic one-liners . . . it reeks of mortality, but it is thoroughly bracing. -- Phil Baker * Sunday Times *
Savagely comic * 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. -- Robbie Millen * 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. -- Suzi Feay * 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 -- James Walton * The Times *
The greatest Mitteleuropean novelist ever to have come from Australia . . . Toltz's great skill is to make [his] monsters in a lunatic way loveable . . . I read the final pages through a veil of tears. Of course, the flipside to such remorseless, brilliantly withering contempt is sentimentality. It is perhaps the most difficult genre to do well, and Toltz does it humanely, compassionately and unforgettably. -- Stuart Kelly * Scotland on Sunday *
Toltz is the king of pitch-black comedy and personal catastrophe . . . his new novel grapples with big existential questions but is also stuffed with zingers. If there's no cure for being alive, laughter is still the best medicine. -- Justine Jordan * Guardian *
A wildly comic riff on love, mortality and metaphysics; an extended vision of the afterlife that resembles Dante on magic mushrooms . . . Thought-provoking, inventive and full of literary pyrotechnics, this remarkable novel is unlike anything you will read this year. * Simon Humphreys, Mail on Sunday *
