'The virtuoso new novel from the author of the Booker-shortlisted A Fraction of the Whole.
'Nobody was ever thinking about me. Now that I’m dead, I dwell on this kind of thing a lot.'
'Angus Mooney is in a dark place: the afterlife. His days are spent in aching embarrassment; god, religion, the supernatural – he was wrong about everything. He longs for his audacious, fiery wife, Gracie, but can only watch from the other side as she is seduced by his killer, who has stepped seamlessly into Mooney’s shoes.
'Meanwhile, life after death isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Another pandemic is sweeping the globe; Mooney’s new home is filling up fast, resources are scarce, infrastructure is crumbling, and he has to share an increasingly cramped existence with a group of people still traumatised by their own deaths. And although he should know better, he remains in the grip of the same fear as when he was alive: the opinions of others.
'Narrated with the ironic hindsight afforded by life beyond the mortal plane, Here Goes Nothing is a razor-sharp, hilariously entertaining, insightful and moving meditation on our 21st-century world, and the intricate relationship between love and death.' (Publication summary)
'A bleak imaginative tale interspersed with words of wisdom.'
'For Steve Toltz, everything, even death, is a joke. His third novel, Here Goes Nothing,is an afterlife satire for a disenchanted secular world. The protagonist Angus Mooney, an atheist, wakes up after being murdered to find his ‘sneering contempt for the supernatural’ confronted by evidence to the contrary. The title reveals itself as a pun: the ‘nothing’ that ‘goes’ is eternal oblivion.'(Introduction)
'What happens when we die? Human curiosity about the afterlife has inspired countless artists and storytellers from the earliest myths through to Dante and Boccaccio. More recently we’ve had Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (2002) and George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), as well as sitcoms like Netflix’s philosophical The Good Place and Amazon’s capitalist dystopia Upload, and now Steve Toltz’s alternately bleak and bonkers take in Here Goes Nothing.' (Introduction)
