The Answer to Everything

A heartbreakingly moving and hilariously funny novel about marriage, parenting, love, desire and betrayal

Emily should be happy. She has a nice enough husband, Steven (even if they never actually speak to each other any more, let alone sleep in the same bed); two little boys she loves deeply (even if a full night’s sleep is a distant memory) – and now, a brand-new house in which they can throw up shelves and pictures and live out all of the bourgeois fantasies she knows she should be ashamed of but cannot resist. But still she aches for something more.

Enter Alathea and Elliott, their new neighbours, who have sons of almost exactly the same age. Alathea is all the popular, confident girls of Emily’s youth who would never talk to her back then, except that she’s disarmingly open and wants to be friends. And Elliott … Elliott is intriguing. Dishevelled, talented, charming and a little lost, he seems as fascinated by Emily as she is by him, and soon their friendship has reached an intensity neither of them seem able to control.

Rich in layers and surprising revelations, and as riotously funny as it is achingly moving, this is a novel about disappointment and yearning, about parenting and growing up, and, above all, about the search for love and meaning.