All's Well: A Novel

Mona Awad

Aug 2021 · Sold by Simon and Schuster

About this ebook

From the author of Bunny, which Margaret Atwood hails as “genius,” comes a “wild, and exhilarating” (Lauren Groff) novel about a theater professor who is convinced staging Shakespeare’s most maligned play will remedy all that ails her—but at what cost?

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 a “fabulous novel” (Mary Karr) about a woman at her breaking point and a formidable, piercingly funny indictment of our collective refusal to witness and believe female pain.

Ratings and reviews

From the pain medication commercial at the start, All’s Well breezes through a surrealistic journey of a drama professor’s experience with chronic pain and those who doubt the pain. The novel forgoes any easy placement into a genre, but it borrows imagery and mood from horror, more than anything. The scenes in which the three men appear and Miranda’s golden touch occurs have a dark magical feel to them. Descriptions of Miranda’s romantic encounters with Hugo read like fever dream memories. The constant barrage of her close contacts insisting that it’s ‘in her head’ and she holds the power to make the pain go away--it’s very clear that no one understands what it is Miranda’s asking for or is willing to grant her it. Awad’s style can best be described as ‘stream of consciousness,’ but there’s absolutely a rhythm to her writing, more often than not making me laugh with Miranda’s thoughts running on impeccable comedic timing. Her prose waits for no one and I appreciate that. I’m still assembling pieces together, but All’s Well is one of the most enjoyable reading experiences I’ve had this year, with exquisite writing and a protagonist asking for sincere empathy. The novel endeared itself to me from the beginning and I simply couldn't get enough of this very rich story. It’s easily one of my favorite books of the year.

About the author

Mona Awad is the author of the novels All’s Well, Bunny, and 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl. Bunny was a finalist for a Goodreads Choice Award and the New England Book Award. It was named a Best Book of 2019 by Time, Vogue, and the New York Public Library. It is currently being developed for film with Bad Robot Productions. All’s Well was a finalist for a Goodreads Choice Award. 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl was shortlisted for the Giller Prize. Awad’s forthcoming novel Rouge, is being adapted for film by Fremantle and Sinestra. This spring, Margaret Atwood named Awad her “literary heir” in The New York Times’s T Magazine. She teaches fiction in the creative writing program at Syracuse University and is based in Boston.