I couldn’t stop listening to this audiobook. It is easy to make the assumption that she is entirely self involved, but who wouldn’t be if you listened to their thoughts? We get to take a peek inside her thought processes, her fears, her pain, her hopes, her dreams, her desires. What if the people who rolled their eyes at her limp when she walked could take a stroll in her shoes? Would they learn empathy?Īll’s Well masterfully mixes the fantastical with every day life to the point that you’re not sure what is real and what is imagined. She struggles with debilitating pain that no one takes seriously. Since her accident, things haven’t been easy for her. She is a college theatre professor tasked with putting on the annual Shakespeare play, but this year things are a little different. 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. With prose Margaret Atwood has described as “no punches pulled, no hilarities dodged…genius,” Mona Awad has concocted her most potent, subversive novel yet.

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.

Miranda sees her chance at redemption slip through her fingers. 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. And now, she’s on the verge of losing her job as a college theater director. The accident that ended her burgeoning acting career left her with excruciating chronic back pain, a failed marriage, and a deepening dependence on painkillers. Miranda Fitch’s life is a waking nightmare. 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?

All's Well by Mona Awad