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Summary
Summary
On a hot summer day, Joanna Mason's family slowly wanders home along a country lane. A moment later, Joanna's life is changed forever. On a dark night thirty years later, ex-detective Jackson Brodie finds himself on a train that is both crowded and late. Lost in his thoughts, he suddenly hears a shocking sound. At the end of a long day, 16-year-old Reggie is looking forward to watching a little TV. Then a terrifying noise shatters her peaceful evening. These three lives come together in unexpected and deeply thrilling ways in the latest novel from Kate Atkinson, the critically acclaimed author who Harlan Coben calls "an absolute must-read."
Author Notes
Kate Atkinson was born in York, and studied English Literature at the University of Dundee. She earned her Masters Degree from Dundee in 1974. She then went on to study for a doctorate in American Literature but she failed at the viva (oral examination) stage. After leaving the university, she took on a variety of jobs from home help to legal secretary and teacher. Her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year ahead of Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh and Roy Jenkins's biography of William Ewart Gladstone. It went on to be a Sunday Times bestseller.
Since then, she has published another five novels, one play, and one collection of short stories. Her work is often celebrated for its wit, wisdom and subtle characterisation, and the surprising twists and plot turns. Her most recent work has featured the popular former detective Jackson Brodie. In 2009, she donated the short story Lucky We Live Now to Oxfam's 'Ox-Tales' project, four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Atkinson's story was published in the 'Earth' collection. In March 2010, Atkinson appeared at the York Literature Festival, giving a world-premier reading from an early chapter from her forthcoming novel Started Early, Took My Dog, which is set mainly in the English city of Leeds.
Atkinson's bestselling novel, Life after Life, has won numerous awards, including the COSTA Novel Award for 2013. The follow-up to Life After Life is A God in Ruins and was published in 2015. This title won a Costa Book Award 2015 in the novel category.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (1)
Guardian Review
Kate Atkinson threw her readers a curveball a few books back. Starting her career with a bang by winning the Whitbread Book of the Year for her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum , Atkinson had seemed to set out a stall for smart, playful yet astringent novels in which the traditional family saga was cheerfully blown to pieces. Behind the Scenes began, like Tristram Shandy , with the conception of its narrator, and then ploughed through the rest of her life with tremendous energy and subversive humour. Atkinson's next two novels, Human Croquet and especially Emotionally Weird , covered similar material (with some swipes at academia woven in) but were increasingly formally complex, and not always happily so. She began twisting her plots into ever more elaborate shapes and playing games with literary in-jokes, varying fonts and pages of blackness. Depending on how you chose to look at it, she was either breaking the rules of narrative in the grand tradition of Sterne or writing herself into a meta-fictional corner. And then came the switch. A Literary writer with a capital L (though one with a nicely disreputable sense of fun), Atkinson unexpectedly turned to crime fiction. Perhaps she wanted to see if the limitations of genre were paradoxically liberating, or perhaps she just wanted to play literary pranks of a more subtle variety. Frankly, it's hard to care when the results are this good. The three novels featuring retired police inspector Jackson Brodie - Case Histories , One Good Turn and now When Will There Be Good News? - are delightful evidence of an author unbound. Swiping a polished dagger through her Gordian knot, Atkinson began tackling life and death and fate and love with a freedom and fluency unseen in her earlier novels. By becoming a crime writer, she has - in a way that other "literary" types may wish to note - become a better literary writer than ever: funny, bracingly intelligent and delightfully prickly. When Will There Be Good News? opens with an act of shocking violence. Six-year-old Joanna is out walking with sister Jessica, baby brother Joseph and mother Gabrielle when they're suddenly attacked by Andrew Decker, a complete stranger. Joanna hides in the long grass and is saved, but her brother, sister and mother are stabbed to death. Thirty years later, Joanna is now Dr Joanna Hunter, a successful GP in Edinburgh with a baby, married to Neil, a local businessman. For a nanny, Joanna hires 16-year-old Reggie, whose mother has recently drowned on holiday and who is taking private tutoring for her Greek and Latin A-levels from terminally ill born-again Christian Ms MacDonald. Reggie has no experience with small children ("What was there to know? They were small, they were helpless, they were confused, and Reggie could identify with all of that"), but the fit is a comfortable one for both her and Dr Hunter, despite Reggie's need to keep drug-dealing brother Billy away from her working life. Brodie, meanwhile, is in Yorkshire, stealing a strand of hair from a two-year-old boy. At first we think he's investigating a kidnapping, but it turns out that the boy may be Jackson's own son; his mother is ex-girlfriend Julia from the previous novels, now estranged from Jackson and claiming he isn't the father. Hair in his possession, Jackson tries to return to his new home in London. This turns out to be surprisingly difficult. Back in Edinburgh, Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe, who nearly had a romantic connection with Brodie in One Good Turn , is now happily if surprisingly married to jolly orthopaedic surgeon Patrick ("He was Irish, which always helped"). Monroe is the one who has to alert Dr Hunter that Decker has served his full sentence and is about to be released. Coincidentally (in a book filled with them), she's back at the same house the next day, interviewing Neil Hunter, whose arcade has burned down in a suspicious fire. Events ramp up at considerable speed. There is a surprising train crash which, again coincidentally, happens in Ms MacDonald's backyard while Reggie is house-sitting. The train crash is, in fact, caused by Ms MacDonald losing control of her car, and Reggie rushes out into the night to look for survivors, saving the life of none other than Brodie, who really, really got on the wrong train. Reggie is also alarmed at the sudden disappearance of Dr Hunter, and pesters DCI Monroe to investigate, even though her husband swears she's only gone off to visit a sick aunt. Is this true? Has the reappearance of Decker caused her to flee? Or is there something even worse going on? Lovers of the crime genre have given Atkinson a hard time for her use of coincidence, and truth be told, the first half of When Will There Be Good News? can be a little hard to swallow. There are a lot of characters with similar backgrounds to keep track of, and they all keep running into each other in increasingly unlikely ways. There was even a point halfway through - when the ID of one character turned up in the pocket of another - when I groaned audibly. But if authors weren't allowed to use coincidence, then there'd be no EM Forster (there'd certainly be no Howards End ). The ID issue is resolved, and you begin to see that Atkinson has larger issues in mind. By putting coincidence so firmly in control of her plot - all the way through to its very last page, where two protagonists are revealed to have an even deeper connection - she starts to raise larger questions of destiny and fate, much as Paul Thomas Anderson does in his great film Magnolia Both works acknowledge archly that we are participating in a work of fiction and that the rules are different here, but they're also working towards a greater truth than simple realism allows: how intertwined are we, as family, as lovers, as humans? How much are we governed by circumstances beyond our control? It is impossible, Atkinson argues, to take any action in a vacuum, to live your own life not completely bound up in the lives of others. "A coincidence," Brodie says more than once, "is just an explanation waiting to happen." Atkinson's writing continues to be wonderful. A group of 12-year-old girls is "all fruity lipgloss and incredibly tedious secrets". Young Joanna's father, a famous novelist, is "' the Howard Mason' (or sometimes, not smiling, ' that Howard Mason', which was different although Joanna wasn't sure how)". "I have no idea how to love another human being," Louise Monroe says, "unless it's by tearing them to pieces and eating them." The literary references are funnier, too, with chapter titles such as "She Would Get the Flowers Herself", or Monroe realising, in a lovely moment, that in her marriage she's "the golden bowl" and "sooner or later the crack would show". And Atkinson takes no prisoners as she heads towards a defiantly feel-bad ending, in which the noblest characters are capable of questionable actions and even the happiest are surrounded by unease. Kate Atkinson is that rarest of beasts, a genuinely surprising novelist. In the best possible way, I have no idea what she might write next. Only that I'll certainly want to read it. Patrick Ness's The Knife of Never Letting Go is published by Walker Books. To order When Will There Be Good News? for pounds 16.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. Caption: article-atkinsonbotw16.1 Thirty years later, Joanna is now Dr Joanna Hunter, a successful GP in Edinburgh with a baby, married to [Neil Hunter], a local businessman. For a nanny, Joanna hires 16-year-old Reggie, whose mother has recently drowned on holiday and who is taking private tutoring for her Greek and Latin A-levels from terminally ill born-again Christian Ms MacDonald. Reggie has no experience with small children ("What was there to know? They were small, they were helpless, they were confused, and Reggie could identify with all of that"), but the fit is a comfortable one for both her and Dr Hunter, despite Reggie's need to keep drug-dealing brother Billy away from her working life. [Kate Atkinson]'s writing continues to be wonderful. A group of 12-year-old girls is "all fruity lipgloss and incredibly tedious secrets". Young Joanna's father, a famous novelist, is "' the Howard Mason' (or sometimes, not smiling, ' that Howard Mason', which was different although Joanna wasn't sure how)". "I have no idea how to love another human being," [Louise Monroe] says, "unless it's by tearing them to pieces and eating them." The literary references are funnier, too, with chapter titles such as "She Would Get the Flowers Herself", or Monroe realising, in a lovely moment, that in her marriage she's "the golden bowl" and "sooner or later the crack would show". And Atkinson takes no prisoners as she heads towards a defiantly feel-bad ending, in which the noblest characters are capable of questionable actions and even the happiest are surrounded by unease. - Kate Atkinson.
Excerpts
Excerpts
I In the Past Harvest The heat rising up from the tarmac seemed to get trapped between the thick hedges that towered above their heads like -battlements. 'Oppressive,' their mother said. They felt trapped too. 'Like the maze at Hampton Court,' their mother said. 'Remember?' 'Yes,' Jessica said. 'No,' Joanna said. 'You were just a baby,' their mother said to Joanna. 'Like Joseph is now.' Jessica was eight, Joanna was six. The little road (they always called it 'the lane') snaked one way and then another, so that you couldn't see anything ahead of you. They had to keep the dog on the lead and stay close to the hedges in case a car 'came out of nowhere'. Jessica was the eldest so she was the one who always got to hold the dog's lead. She spent a lot of her time training the dog, 'Heel!' and 'Sit!' and 'Come!' Their mother said she wished Jessica was as obedient as the dog. Jessica was always the one who was in charge. Their mother said to Joanna, 'It's all right to have a mind of your own, you know. You should stick up for yourself, think for yourself,' but Joanna didn't want to think for herself. The bus dropped them on the big road and then carried on to somewhere else. It was 'a palaver' getting them all off the bus. Their mother held Joseph under one arm like a parcel and with her other hand she struggled to open out his newfangled buggy. Jessica and Joanna shared the job of lifting the shopping off the bus. The dog saw to himself. 'No one ever helps,' their mother said. 'Have you noticed that?' They had. 'Your father's country fucking idyll,' their mother said as the bus drove away in a blue haze of fumes and heat. 'Don't you swear,' she added automatically, 'I'm the only person allowed to swear.' They didn't have a car any more. Their father ('the bastard') had driven away in it. Their father wrote books, 'novels'. He had taken one down from a shelf and shown it to Joanna, pointed out his photo-graph on the back cover and said, 'That's me,' but she wasn't allowed to read it, even though she was already a good reader. ('Not yet, one day. I write for grown-ups, I'm afraid,' he laughed. 'There's stuff in there, well . . .') Their father was called Howard Mason and their mother's name was Gabrielle. Sometimes people got excited and smiled at their father and said, 'Are you the Howard Mason?' (Or sometimes, not smiling, ' that Howard Mason' which was different although Joanna wasn't sure how.) Their mother said that their father had uprooted them and planted them 'in the middle of nowhere'. 'Or Devon, as it's commonly known,' their father said. He said he needed 'space to write' and it would be good for all of them to be 'in touch with nature'. 'No -television!' he said as if that was something they would enjoy. Joanna still missed her school and her friends and Wonder Woman and a house on a street that you could walk along to a shop where you could buy the Beano and a liquorice stick and choose from three different kinds of apples instead of having to walk along a lane and a road and take two buses and then do the same thing all over again in reverse. The first thing their father did when they moved to Devon was to buy six red hens and a hive full of bees. He spent all autumn digging over the garden at the front of the house so it would be 'ready for spring'. When it rained the garden turned to mud and the mud was trailed everywhere in the house, they even found it on their bed sheets. When winter came a fox ate the hens without them ever -having laid an egg and the bees all froze to death which was unheard of, according to their father, who said he was going to put all those things in the book ('the novel') he was writing. 'So that's all right then,' their mother said. Their father wrote at the kitchen table because it was the only room in the house that was even the slightest bit warm, thanks to the huge temperamental Aga that their mother said was 'going to be the death of her'. 'I should be so lucky,' their father muttered. (His book wasn't going well.) They were all under his feet, even their mother. 'You smell of soot,' their father said to their mother. 'And cabbage and milk.' 'And you smell of failure,' their mother said. Their mother used to smell of all kinds of interesting things, paint and turpentine and tobacco and the Je Reviens perfume that their father had been buying for her since she was seventeen years old and 'a Catholic schoolgirl', and which meant 'I will return' and was a message to her. Their mother was 'a beauty' according to their father but their mother said she was 'a painter', although she hadn't painted anything since they moved to Devon. 'No room for two creative -talents in a marriage,' she said in that way she had, raising her eyebrows while inhaling smoke from the little brown cigarillos she smoked. She pronounced it thigariyo like a foreigner. When she was a child she had lived in faraway places that she would take them to one day. She was warm-blooded, she said, not like their father who was a reptile. Their mother was clever and funny and surprising and -nothing like their friends' mothers. 'Exotic', their father said. The argument about who smelled of what wasn't over apparently because their mother picked up a blue-and-white-striped jug from the dresser and threw it at their father, who was sitting at the table staring at his typewriter as if the words would write themselves if he was patient enough. The jug hit him on the side of the head and he roared with shock and pain. With a speed that Joanna could only admire, Jessica plucked Joseph out of his high-chair and said, 'Come on,' to Joanna and they went upstairs where they tickled Joseph on the double bed that Joanna and Jessica shared. There was no heating in the bedroom and the bed was piled high with eiderdowns and old coats that belonged to their mother. Eventually all three of them fell asleep, nestled in the mingled scents of damp and mothballs and Je Reviens. When Joanna woke up she found Jessica propped up on pillows, wearing gloves and a pair of earmuffs and one of the coats from the bed, drowning her like a tent. She was reading a book by torchlight. 'Electricity's off,' she said, without taking her eyes off the book. On the other side of the wall they could hear the horrible animal noises that meant their parents were friends again. Jessica silently offered Joanna the earmuffs so that she didn't have to listen. When the spring finally came, instead of planting a vegetable -garden, their father went back to London and lived with 'his other woman' -- which was a big surprise to Joanna and Jessica, although not apparently to their mother. Their father's other woman was called Martina -- the poet -- their mother spat out the word as if it was a curse. Their mother called the other woman ( the poet ) names that were so bad that when they dared to whisper them ( bitch-cunt-whore-poet ) to each other beneath the bedclothes they were like poison in the air. Although now there was only one person in the marriage, their mother still didn't paint. They made their way along the lane in single file, 'Indian file', their mother said. The plastic shopping bags hung from the handles of the buggy and if their mother let go it tipped backwards on to the ground. 'We must look like refugees,' she said. 'Yet we are not downhearted,' she added cheerfully. They were going to move back into town at the end of the summer, 'in time for school'. 'Thank God,' Jessica said, in just the same way their mother said it. Joseph was asleep in the buggy, his mouth open, a faint rattle from his chest because he couldn't shake off a summer cold. He was so hot that their mother stripped him to his nappy and Jessica blew on the thin ribs of his little body to cool him down until their mother said, 'Don't wake him.' There was the tang of manure in the air and the smell of the musty grass and the cow parsley got inside Joanna's nose and made her sneeze. 'Bad luck,' her mother said, 'you're the one that got my allergies.' Their mother's dark hair and pale skin went to her 'beautiful boy' Joseph, her green eyes and her 'painter's hands' went to Jessica. Joanna got the allergies. Bad luck. Joseph and their mother shared a birthday too although Joseph hadn't had any birthdays yet. In another week it would be his first. 'That's a special birthday,' their mother said. Joanna thought all birthdays were special. Their mother was wearing Joanna's favourite dress, blue with a pattern of red strawberries. Their mother said it was old and next summer she would cut it up and make something for Joanna out of it if she liked. Joanna could see the muscles on her mother's tanned legs moving as she pushed the buggy up the hill. She was strong. Their father said she was 'fierce'. Joanna liked that word. Jessica was fierce too. Joseph was nothing yet. He was just a baby, fat and happy. He liked oatmeal and mashed banana, and the mobile of little paper birds their mother had made for him that hung above his cot. He liked being tickled by his sisters. He liked his sisters. Joanna could feel sweat running down her back. Her worn cotton dress was sticking to her skin. The dress was a hand-me-down from Jessica. 'Poor but honest,' their mother laughed. Her big mouth turned down when she laughed so that she never seemed happy even when she was. Everything Joanna had was handed down from Jessica. It was as if without Jessica there would be no Joanna. Joanna filled the spaces Jessica left behind as she moved on. Invisible on the other side of the hedge, a cow made a bellowing noise that made her jump. 'It's just a cow,' her mother said. 'Red Devons,' Jessica said, even though she couldn't see them. How did she know? She knew the names of everything, seen and unseen. Joanna wondered if she would ever know all the things that Jessica knew. After you had walked along the lane for a while you came to a wooden gate with a stile. They couldn't get the buggy through the stile so they had to open the gate. Jessica let the dog off the lead and he scrambled up and over the gate in the way that Jessica had taught him. The sign on the gate said 'Please Close The Gate Behind You'. Jessica always ran ahead and undid the clasp and then they both pushed at the gate and swung on it as it opened. Their mother had to heave and shove at the buggy because all the winter mud had dried into deep awkward ruts that the wheels got stuck in. They swung on the gate to close it as well. Jessica checked the clasp. Sometimes they hung upside down on the gate and their hair reached the ground like brooms sweeping the dust and their mother said, 'Don't do that.' The track bordered a field. 'Wheat,' Jessica said. The wheat was very high although not as high as the hedges in the lane. 'They'll be harvesting soon,' their mother said. 'Cutting it down,' she added, for Joanna's benefit. 'Then we'll sneeze and wheeze, the pair of us.' Joanna was already wheezing, she could hear the breath whistling in her chest. The dog ran into the field and disappeared. A moment later he sprang out of the wheat again. Last week Joanna had followed the dog into the field and got lost and no one could find her for a long time. She could hear them calling her, moving further and further away. Nobody heard her when she called back. The dog found her. They stopped halfway along and sat down on the grass at the side of the track, under the shady trees. Their mother took the plastic -carrier bags off the buggy handles and from one of the bags brought out some little cartons of orange juice and a box of chocolate finger biscuits. The orange juice was warm and the chocolate biscuits had melted together. They gave some of the biscuits to the dog. Their mother laughed with her down-turned mouth and said, 'God, what a mess,' and looked in the baby-bag and found wipes for their -chocolate-covered hands and mouths. When they lived in London they used to have proper picnics, loading up the boot of the car with a big wicker basket that had belonged to their mother's mother who was rich but dead (which was just as well apparently because it meant she didn't have to see her only daughter married to a selfish, -fornicating waster). If their grandmother was rich why didn't they have any money? 'I eloped,' their mother said. 'I ran away to marry your father. It was very romantic. At the time. We had nothing.' 'You had the picnic basket,' Jessica said and their mother laughed and said, 'You can be very funny, you know,' and Jessica said, 'I do know.' From the Hardcover edition. Excerpted from When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.