“Shriver has a gift for creating real and complicated characters… A highly engrossing novel.” — San Francisco Chronicle From New York Times bestselling author Lionel Shriver ( The Post-Birthday World, We Need to Talk About Kevin ), comes a searing, deeply humane novel about a crumbling marriage resurrected in the face of illness, and a family’s struggle to come to terms with disease, dying, and the obscene cost of medical care in modern America. Some critics were initially turned off at the thought of reading Shriver's latest offering because, really, how interesting can a novel about health care be? Rather than being pedantic or depressing, however, So Much for That is a thoughtful and powerful look at the effect our health policies have on middle-class Americans. It also raises the unsettling question about the worth, both financial and emotional, of a human life. While several critics thought the secondary storyline involving Shep's buddy Jackson was contrived and others felt that Shriver offered too much information on health care, most agreed that Shep and Glynis's story was "visceral and deeply affecting" (New York Times). In Shriver’s latest and exceptionally timely novel, she probes not so delicately into the workings of a marriage, while at the same time exposing the many deficiencies in the American health-care system. Shep Knacker, 48, is finally ready to escape from tax planning and traffic jams to what he for years has called The Afterlife. He and his wife, Glynis, have taken annual “research” trips to exotic locales like Goa, Laos, and Morocco, Shep diligently compiling notebooks bursting with home prices, crime rates, weather, and—for Zach, their teenage son—Internet access. As Shep announces to Glynis that the time has come to start enjoying their leisure time while they still can, she calmly reports she’s just been diagnosed with mesothelioma, a rare and extremely virulent cancer. Shep calmly shreds their airplane tickets, and over the next year watches his Merrill Lynch account drop to nothing, The Afterlife nest egg spent on chemo, hospitalizations, and out-of-network specialists. Shriver perceptively dissects every facet of Glynis’ illness, from Zach’s withdrawal to friends who never visit or call, immersing the reader in how this family deals with terminal disease, and its rippling effects. --Deborah Donovan “A delicious novel. . . . So Much for That, Lionel Shriver’s improbably feel-good black comedy, is the rare book that can make suicide, near-bankruptcy and terminal cancer so engaging you can’t wait to turn the page. . . . Provocative, entertaining-and so very timely.” - Jocelyn McClurg, USA Today “[A] shrewd, ambitious novel. . . . Shriver’s prose is frank and often beautiful . . . nuanced and persuasive.” - The New Yorker “With her new novel, So Much for That, Lionel Shriver strengthens her already credible claim to the title of best living American writer. . . . Her work offers an appealing combination of qualities that seldom come together in a single writer. She couples the hardheaded social observation of Edith Wharton or George Eliot with a relentless psychological and artistic boldness that belongs more to the tradition of Melville or Dostoevsky. Exerting these different skills with immense confidence and penetration, Shriver is one of our great American originals.” - Kevin Frazier, The Millions “[Shriver] certainly has her finger on national nerves.” - Birmingham Post “A visceral and deeply affecting story, a story about how illness affects people’s relationships, and how their efforts to grapple with mortality reshape the arcs of their lives. . . . [Shriver’s] understanding of her people is so intimate, so unsentimental . . . it lofts these characters permanently into the reader’s imagination.” - Michiko Kakutani, New York Times “Harrowing yet riveting.... Wisely, Shriver doesn’t make her characters all saints.... [They] come alive with visceral abandon.... Clever, convincing...stubbornly real-and chillingly personal.” - Julia Keller, Chicago Tribune “Artists like Lionel Shriver have the ability to illuminate mere events and bring them to life. Her books get under your skin because they’re so very grounded in the real world. . . . Art, like life, doesn’t always cut us the breaks we desire. If we’re lucky-and in the capable hands of a writer like Shriver-we emerge all the wiser for it. And don’t let the weighty subject matter scare you off: the spot-on, often hilarious characterizations kept me reading hungrily until the very end.” - Shannon Rhoades, NPR's "Morning Edition" “The rare novel that will shake and change you. With these wholly realistic and sympathetic characters, [Shriver] makes us consider the most existential questions of our lives and the dreadful calculus of modern health care in this country…. It’s a bitter pill, indeed, but take it if you can.” - Ron Charles, Washington Post “Shriver writes in precise, dynamic prose…. If anyone’s going