All's Well

The Washington Post

From the first sentence [of All s Well], Miranda feels like a friend. As you follow her through her nightmare, you can t help but root for her in spite of her small-mindedness, her malice, her squirm-inducing behaviour. You ll laugh, you ll cry, you ll cringe.
The Globe and Mail

[A] surreal exploration of chronic pain, women's believability and visibility, and desperation that straddles the line between comedy and horror. . . . [W]here Bunny explored the dark side of universally human urge to belong, in All's Well, Awad directs her caustic commentary at a more pointed social problem: the refusal to acknowledge female pain.
NPR

Awad is particularly deft in describing the hellish nature of pain and the ways those living with chronic pain are often misled, dismissed, or derided. . . . Imbued with magic and Shakespearean themes, [All s Well] swings wildly between tragedy and comedy and reality and unreality. . . . Awad artfully and acutely explores suffering, artistry, and the limitations of empathy. A strange, dramatic novel where all s well, or not well, or perhaps both.
Kirkus Reviews
 
[All s Well] is a darkly hilarious journey into the psyche of a woman approaching her breaking point.
TIME

Awad has a penchant for mixing dark humor and dark magic.
Los Angeles Times

Mona Awad s All s Well is an incisive, brilliant, and grotesque portrait of a college theatre program. We are introduced to a wonderfully monstrous and self-pitying theatre professor whose students are in constant mutiny against her. Awad weaves the tales of All s Well That Ends Well and Macbeth into her narrative with an almost shocking brilliance. This tale is tragic, macabre, and wicked, and I laughed out loud the whole way through. One of the funniest books I ve read in years.
Heather O'Neill, bestselling author of The Lonely Hearts Hotel and Lullabies for Little Criminals

For all my fellow right-thinking adoring readers of Bunny, another dark and insane gem from Mona Awad, full of scintillating insights on Shakespeare, pain, and the human condition.
Elif Batuman, Pulitzer Prize shortlisted author of The Idiot

Wild and exhilarating and so fresh it takes your breath away, All's Well is an utterly delicious novel of pain, Shakespeare, the uncanny, and our own subtle moral failures when we brush up against the anguish of others. Mona Awad's talent is so vital that it absolutely roars out of her.
Lauren Groff, bestselling author of Florida and Fates and Furies

Oh my lord what a fabulous novel knocked me out!
Mary Karr, author of The Liars Club

Mona Awad proves in her dazzling, hilarious, wildly terrifying, virtuoso new novel, All s Well, the paradoxes and incongruities of Shakespeare s lesser-loved play makes an ideal springboard for contemporary fiction.
Christopher Bollen, author of A Beautiful Crime

In this eerie and engrossing novel, Mona Awad deftly delivers a narrator as mesmerizing as she is unreliable. Miranda s quest for her heart s desires illuminates the complex bargains one woman dares to make in her most desperate moments. With its mordant humor and potent surreality, All s Well is a gripping read, and Awad is a writer of great intensity and insight."
Helen Phillips, author of The Need

[A] dazzling, hilarious, wildly terrifying, virtuoso new novel. . . . Awad is a maestro at conjuring the feverish, calamitous voice of her protagonist, Miranda Fitch. . . . Awad is such a risk-taker, and so sure-footed with her narrative leaps and flights, that we willingly take the ride as our heroine descends or does she ascend? into a fearsome, monstrous, nearly incandescent state of being.
Interview Magazine

In her new novel, All s Well, Mona Awad turns to Shakespeare and surrealism to tell a compelling story about suffering that reflects her own experience with 'unspeakable' chronic pain. . . .The result is a portrait of trauma that lingers, whether all ends well or not.
Entertainment Weekly

[A] sparkling valentine to the Bard. A dream of a novel, perfect for a midsummer night s read.
O, The Oprah Magazine

Awad is a dark genius, preternaturally gifted at creating vicious, hilarious tales about the depravity inside us.....A wicked mash-up about opioid addiction, Bard nerds, Faustian deals, and a cursed play? Yes, please.
Vulture

"Awad's writing isn't merely intoxicating. It's incandescent."
The Washington Post

"A stealthily captivating new novel that, like its namesake, skews more dark than light as it casts its spell."
The Boston Globe

Thrilling Awad has taken Shakespeare s premise of illness and spiritual rebirth and turned it into an inventive horror-comedy full of altered realities and uncanny weirdness.  
The Seattle Times

As in Awad s last novel Bunny, things start off weird and institutional and then spiral into madness, and as in Bunny, the experience is a fiendish delight: funny, thrilling, and creepily recognizable.
LitHub

A brilliant noir comedy about art and illness . Awad s characters are deliciously over the top and impossible to forget, as is the author's gift for morbid humor . Endlessly thought-provoking and not to be missed.
Booklist (starred review)

There s both pathos and humor in this story of how we suffer and the ways in which we re healed.
Bookpage

Always compelling. Cheerfully vicious, hilariously hallucinogenic, mixing up scruffy vernacular realism with grotesque, gothic supernaturalism, All s Well treats the serious subject of women s pain with dark, cutting humour. . . . Drawing on her own experience, Awad pulls off an angry, incisive critique of a culture that distrusts and denies the experience of pain, especially female pain.
Winnipeg Free Press

Mona Awad s All s Well is a deliciously sardonic sojourn into a world of invisible illness. . . . [It] barely goes a page without a tart observation or withering remark. This is a bitingly funny and revealing novel about chronic pain, drawn from the author s own experience.
The Sydney Morning Herald

It s a wild, dark, fantastical ride that jumped off the page and made me say, Yes, Mona Awad gets it!
Book Riot