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Published Aug 2019
352 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
A stunning debut novel about a teenage girl and her mother as they grapple with first love, family secrets, and tragedy.
Maddy is sixteen. Smart, funny, and profound, she has loyal friends, a mother with whom she's unusually close, a father she's never met, devoted grandparents, and a crush on a boy named Jack. Maddy also has cancer. Living in the shadow of uncertainty, she is forced to grow up fast.
All the Water in the World is the story of a family doing its best when faced with the worst. Told in the alternating voices of Maddy and her mother, Eve, the narrative moves between the family's lake house in Pennsylvania; their home in Washington, DC; and London, where Maddy's father, Antonio, lives. Hungry for experience, Maddy seeks out her first romantic relationship, finds solace in music and art, and tracks down Antonio. She continually tests the depths and limits of her closeness with her mother, while Eve has to come to terms with the daughter she only partly knows, in a world she can't control.
With unforgettable voices that range from tender to funny, despairing to defiant, this novel illuminates the transformative power of love, humor, and hope.
"Domestic-fiction fans and readers who loved YA novels like John Green's The Fault in our Stars and Nicola Yoon's Everything, Everything will fall for All the Water in the World, which is heartbreaking and heartwarming in equal measure. Unafraid to probe the complexities of parenthood and partnership, Raney is an author to watch." - Booklist (starred review)
"An exquisite tracing of the tangled lines of mother-daughter love, loss, and grief." - Kirkus Reviews
"[T]he novel's final section loses momentum, tapering off into Eve's self-examination and excavation of the past. Raney's pleasing tale is a deep, genuine investigation of memory, the pain of loss, and the strength of a mother's love." - Publishers Weekly
"All The Water in the World is a book about life and death, joy and grief fused together, both affirming and heartbreaking. In Eve and teenage Maddy, Karen Raney has created a mother-daughter relationship as fraught and passionate as any in recent memory. 'Do everything all at once' is Maddy's philosophy as well as the motto of this kinetic and beautiful book." - Darcey Steinke, author of Flash Count Diary and Easter Everywhere
"With a lyric and suspenseful intensity reminiscent of Sue Miller, Karen Raney has written an astonishingly moving novel about the boundaries and boundlessness of life and love." - Joanna Hershon, author of A Dual Inheritance and The Outside of August
This information about All the Water in the World was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Karen Raney recently gained an MA in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London, with a distinction and was awarded the 2017 Pat Kavanagh Prize for All the Water in the World when the novel was still a work in progress. Born in Schenectady, New York, Raney attended Oberlin College, graduated from Duke University, and worked as a nurse before moving to London to study art. She lives in London with her husband and daughter, and teaches at the University of East London.
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