“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 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 that is confident in its good intentions—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. 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. Chapter 1 1. Around a lacquered oak dining table made from looted church pews, below a bulkhead lamp that had once belonged to a Polish fishing trawler, the four members of the Candlewick family were picking distractedly at clay plates of salad. The dish was a delicately improvised medley of charred root vegetables and crumbled feta, doused in manuka honey dressing and crawling with ant-black sesame seeds. One side of the six-hundred-year-old room had been punched out and replaced with a triple-glazed wall of tinted glass, revealing a pale moon hung in the dimming pink sky. It was late April and the magnolia in the centre of the lawn waved its clenched buds like winning tickets. Beyond the back fence, lights flickered on in the leaded windows of neighbouring cottages. At fifteen, Emil Candlewick was the youngest of the family and eating in sporadic bursts while listening to an AirPod lodged in his left ear. The clove of white plastic was relaying a conversation between two Canadian professors about Max Tegmark’s theory that the universe might be a mathematical structure—something Emil had come to believe was possible but not probable, and so painful to consider that it gave him migraines he once described on a physics forum as feeling “like absolute ass.” Emil’s bloated, badger-bearded father, Arthur, was transfixed by the presence of a housefly that had settled on a framed photograph of his family, taken on a beach in the Maldives. In the photograph, the four Candlewicks are ankle-deep in rags of surf, spaced so far apart that they look like a band being shot for a magazine. Below the table, Yara Candlewick’s thumb traced the heartbeats of a stock portfolio on the screen of her phone. The copper bracelet on her right wrist meant to subdue arthritis clinked intermittently against the rim of her plate as she ate with the other hand. A shaft of dusk light tethered her face to the vaulted glass ceiling. Rounding out the ensemble, Yara’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Evangeline, was engrossed in a slim, red paperback, propped open behind her food. She read with the urgency of an actress searching for her own name in a bad review. Still chewing, she l