Published in 2021
352 pages
Mona Awad is the author of four novels. Her debut novel, 13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT A FAT GIRL, won the Amazon Best First Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize. Her second novel, BUNNY, was a finalist for a Goodreads Choice Award for Best Horror, the New England Book Award and won the Ladies of Horror Fiction Best Novel Award. Her most recent novel, ALL’S WELL, was a finalist for a Goodreads Choice Award for Best Horror.
She earned an MFA in fiction from Brown University and an MScR in English from the University of Edinburgh where her dissertation was on fear in the fairy tale. In 2018, she completed a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and English at the University of Denver. She currently teaches creative writing at Syracuse University and lives in Boston.
What is this book about?
From the critically acclaimed author of Bunny, a darkly funny novel about a theater professor suffering chronic pain, who in the process of staging a troubled production of Shakespeare’s most maligned play, suddenly and miraculously recovers.
Miranda Fitch’s life is a waking nightmare. The accident that ended her burgeoning acting career left her with excruciating, chronic back pain, a failed marriage, and a deepening dependence on painkillers. And now she’s on the verge of losing her job as a college theater director. Determined to put on Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, the play that promised, and cost, her everything, she faces a mutinous cast hellbent on staging Macbeth instead. Miranda sees her chance at redemption slip through her fingers.
That’s when she meets three strange benefactors who have an eerie knowledge of Miranda’s past and a tantalizing promise for her future: one where the show goes on, her rebellious students get what’s coming to them, and the invisible, doubted pain that’s kept her from the spotlight is made known.
With prose Margaret Atwood has described as “no punches pulled, no hilarities dodged…genius,” Mona Awad has concocted her most potent, subversive novel yet. All’s Well is the story of a woman at her breaking point and a formidable, piercingly funny indictment of our collective refusal to witness and believe female pain.
