Everything You Ever Wanted

Reviews

Every now and then, a book comes along and pins down the wild thoughts that have been circling around in your brain as you question the meaning of your life in the bath at midnight. Manages to sensitively unpack the frustrations of modern life while appreciating how funny the banality of it all is An important and poignant novel that captures the ennui, panic and stubborn optimism of the zeitgeist with spirit, humour and a fearless portrayal of human truth Beautifully written . . . Everything You Ever Wanted explores our current obsession with a meaningful life Everything You Ever Wanted is one of the most original and urgent novels I've read this year. Sauma dives under the skin of the way we live now and makes it into an astonishing new shape. Funny, heart-breaking and thought-provoking - a novel that talks about all the things we are most afraid to talk about. Read it! Sauma's wondrous novel could not be more timely. Captures the era of social media addiction and status anxiety perfectly. . . . with echoes of The Truman Show and 1984 Uplifting, unputdownable and mordantly funny, Everything You Ever Wanted is the dystopian beach read you didn't know you needed. It's a love letter to London from outer space. It's both a speculative dystopian drama and a deadpan office satire. It's a brilliantly relatable and ambitious ode to the humdrum and the sublime; a truly original novel that captures the pleasures and displeasures of modern, earthly life. Everything You Ever Wanted is so sharp-eyed about our hidden hopes and tiny hypocrisies. Even the most fantastical elements feel painfully, perfectly true. I'd follow Sauma's voice down any wormhole A daring and original novel that asks profound questions about the way we live today whilst being simultaneously playful and fun. Sauma is brilliant at nailing the details of contemporary life in a way that is recognisable to anyone who has suffered the mundanity of office jobs. Courageous, haunting, and beautiful-with EVERYTHING YOU EVER WANTED, Luiza Sauma takes us on a breathtaking voyage through both the farthest reaches of space and the innermost depths of the human soul Tinged with melancholy and yearning, this novel is wry and frequently beautiful, and its culmination is surprising and deeply moving What Sauma captures so excellently is the low level anxiety that hums through everyday life Her writing is beautiful Weird, wonderful and beautifully written Sauma has the horrors of the workplace nailed with satirical precision Absorbing and ambitious. Filled with sharp observations about the way in which we live now, Everything You Ever Wanted is both an acute satire of our social-media dominated times, and a haunting examination of depression and anxiety rendered in diamond sharp prose with barely a wasted word. . . It deserves to be on every prize longlist this year For fans of Black Mirror Millennial angst meets sci-fi Sublime An arresting debut about memory and trauma. In this respect and others, it resembles Julian Barnes's Man Booker-winner, The Sense of an Ending. Luiza Sauma's debut novel is that rare thing: a completely absorbing, brilliantly-designed, literary work. Her writing is beautiful. I am sure I'll see her name on the spine of many a novel to come Sauma skewers the falsities and disappointments of contemporary life and work with rare sensitivity, unfolding an evocative narrative of unearthly escape. I loved it Expand reviews