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A Novel
by Ben Brooks
For readers of Paul Murray's The Bee Sting and Jenny Jackson's Pineapple Street, an irresistibly funny and incisive novel about a wealthy family who are confident in their moral goodness—until the discovery that their patriarch has secretly given all their money to charity ruins their lives.
Meet the Candlewicks.
Seventeen-year-old Evangeline (a.k.a Dubbin), wants to change the world, has a penchant for throwing fake blood during protests, and despairs at the smug complacency of the rest of her family.
Emil is fifteen, and a painfully shy math prodigy who has just begun dabbling in narcotics.
Their mother, Yara, arrives at airports four hours early and fears that AI and climate change will leave her children unemployed and unable to go outside for longer than ten minutes.
And, Arthur, the father, a hapless and always neutral man, who can't decide if he is a good person or a doormat—forgiving and understanding or weak and terrified.
Their comfortable lives are thrown into disarray when Arthur walks out into the woods one night for a stroll in his calfskin slippers only to fall down an abandoned mineshaft. Disoriented and unable to move, he remains there for three days with only a bottle of mid-range Bordeaux, his son's confiscated stash of LSD, and his daughter's book on the concept of Effective Altruism for company.
When he is rescued, he is a man transformed. Determined to give away all of his wealth and devote the rest of his life to the (statistically proven) most worthy causes, his metamorphosis shocks his family and triggers a chain of events that will have far-reaching and unforeseen consequences for them all.
Equal parts hilarious and achingly human, The Greatest Possible Good spans ten years in the lives of the Candlewicks, asking universal questions about what it means to live a good life and if there is a "right" way to be a good person, while introducing the world to one of the most memorable and dysfunctional families in contemporary literature.
"The pleasures of this novel's writing, characters, and plot are fully equal to its good intentions." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"The author's fluid prose goes down easy...but the novel fails to generate a meaningful critique of wealth and its corrosive effect on the characters. Brooks reaches for satire but remains mired in the excess of privilege." —Publishers Weekly
"What begins as a biting satire of privilege soon blossoms into an immersive family saga that asks all the right questions about how to live in an imperfect world. Ultimately, Ben Brooks suggests, the greatest possible good we can do is to be generous with our time and attention — which is exactly what this witty, bittersweet novel deserves." —Andrew Ridker, author of Hope
"A sharp-witted tragicomedy about money, morality, and a family teetering on the brink. A splendidly funny novel." —Jenny Jackson, New York Times bestselling author of Pineapple Street
This information about The Greatest Possible Good 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.
Ben Brooks is the author of books for children and adults, including The Greatest Possible Good and the million-copy series Stories for Boys Who Dare to Be Different, both a Sunday Times (London) and New York Times bestseller, which has been translated into twenty-eight languages and received a British National Book Award. He received a Somerset Maugham Award and Jerwood Fiction Prize for his debut novel Lolito, and the Celsius 232 and Premio Torres del Agua for The Impossible Boy. He also writes for television and is developing original TV projects in the UK and Germany.
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