Anybody Out There? (Marian Keyes)

Marian Keyes once wrote (an equally heart-breaking and hilarious) novel about the battle to overcome alcoholism, and a reviewer – whose name I don’t know, but if I did I would certainly mention it here – didn’t read it and wrote it off as ‘forgettable froth’.

It’s this deplorable review I think about when I open anything written by Marian Keyes.

Marian Keyes writes funny novels about wacky families and mad siblings and loony relationships and wild, passionate love and shoes and handbags, but she roots them in touching plots so searingly real that there’s nothing forgettable or frothy about them.

Actually, sometimes they hurt. Anybody Out There? is one of these.

Badly injured in an accident, Anna Walsh is staying in Dublin with her parents and batty older sister, Helen. She’s pining for her Big Apple home, her heavenly husband Aidan and The Most Fabulous Job in the World^TM. But where the hell is Aidan, and why is he refusing to respond to Anna’s messages?

Proving that she is a maestro able to mix dark and light, tragic and comic, in a way that few writers can, Marian Keyes is getting better all the time. Always just as cheeky as they are thought-provoking, her stories are getting cleverer, her characters nuttier and her dialogues more delicious. Read this book!

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