Everything You Ever Wanted: A Florence Welch Between Two Books Pick

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When looking at the reviews for this book after finishing it, a common complaint was the fact that the characters are all fairly two-dimensional. 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. The creation of Iris, and the carving-out of her depression-streaked journey, feels very much like an indictment of modern life that pulls no punches.

The story took a weird turn about three-fourths of the way in and some of the storylines were just dropped with no resolution at all.As a premise, it’s straight out of the Black Mirror playbook and there are shades of Charlie Brooker’s creation both in the way in which Sauma dissects Iris’s growing plight and in the cool, biting prose with which she lays out the emptiness of her previous life in London, working for “a creative agency with outposts in New York and Amsterdam”.

Yet, when further considered, the idea of 24hr sunshine is actually quite inconvienent as it suggests a lack of the passing of time, and makes certain things linked to time more challenging- like the ability to sleep and being aware of the flow of time. The latter was shortlisted for the Encore Award and recommended by Florence Welch's book club, Between Two Books. Iris Cohen, the heroine of Luiza Sauma’s absorbing and ambitious second novel, Everything You Ever Wanted, chooses the last of these options, making it through the recruitment process to become one of 100 “lucky” people who will forge a new life on newly discovered planet Nyx. It should have been a win for me - a possible murder in a hazing gone wrong, family secrets, plenty of intrigue - but it just fell flat. Each character was socially defunct, functioned insularly, and was all so consumed by his/her first world problems.

This is a novel that will make you squirm a little bit, and maybe even encourage you to be a little more introspective about your own life.

The rising action and the simultaneous climaxes kept me hooked, but the resolutions just killed my reading momentum with the characters’ over-introspection. This grossly oversimplified understanding has created many complexities in our lives and taken away from us the very fundamentals of the joy of living. I think she does die eventually; that all of the imagery of her de-robing and the echoes in the narrative of her swimming with her younger sister in a pond in a park in London represents a form of spiritual release for Iris. Publication dates are subject to change (although this is an extremely uncommon occurrence overall). The reader learns that one tragic event dissolved the bond between Scott and Charles, Charles and his ex-girlfriend, Sylvie and her (now deceased) husband, as well as the boys and their (now deceased) father.

Through the lens of Life on Nyx, Sauma also scrutinizes reality TV and the issues surrounding contestants and their mental wellbeing with a subtle nod to Orwell’s 1984 and a modernisation on the idea of ‘Big Brother is always watching you. For David Goggins, childhood was a nightmare--poverty, prejudice, and physical abuse colored his days and haunted his nights. Scarlett is as far from Sloaney origins of Tiggy as possible: out of a council estate, away from a mother who hardly provided any mothering, she's confident, cynical, utterly selfish and she has, as I mentioned before, a grand plan she's working towards.