All's Well

"Dear Readers: This is one wild book! . . . No holds barred." -Margaret Atwood via Twitter

"Mind-blowing. Equal parts brilliant and hilarious." -Heather O'Neill, bestselling author of The Lonely Hearts Hotel and Lullabies for Little Criminals


From the critically acclaimed author of Bunny, a darkly funny novel about a theatre professor suffering chronic pain who, in the process of staging a troubled production of Shakespeare's most maligned play, suddenly and miraculously recovers.

Miranda Fitch's life is a waking nightmare. The accident that ended her burgeoning acting career left her with excruciating, chronic back pain, a failed marriage, and a deepening dependence on painkillers. And now she's on the verge of losing her job as a college theater director. Determined to put on Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well, the play that promised, and cost, her everything, she faces a mutinous cast hell-bent on staging Macbeth instead. Miranda sees her chance at redemption slip through her fingers.

That's when she meets three strange benefactors who have an eerie knowledge of Miranda's past and a tantalizing promise for her future: one where the show goes on, her rebellious students get what's coming to them, and the invisible, doubted pain that's kept her from the spotlight is made known.

With prose Margaret Atwood has described as "no punches pulled, no hilarities dodged . . . genius," Mona Awad has concocted her most potent, subversive novel yet. All's Well is the story of a woman at her breaking point and a formidable, piercingly funny indictment of our collective refusal to witness and believe female pain.

Praise for All's Well:

"Dear Readers: This is one wild book! . . . No holds barred." 
-Margaret Atwood via Twitter

"A dazzling wild ride of a novel-daring, fresh, entertaining, and magical. Mona Awad is a powerful and poetic storyteller, telling us something new and profound here about the connection between suffering and elation. When I was away from this book, I longed to get back to it."
-George Saunders, Booker Prize-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo

"Mona Awad's All's Well is an incisive, brilliant, and grotesque portrait of a college theatre program. We are introduced to a wonderfully monstrous and self-pitying theatre professor whose students are in constant mutiny against her. Awad weaves the tales of All's Well That Ends Well and Macbeth into her narrative with an almost shocking brilliance. This tale is tragic, macabre, and wicked, and I laughed out loud the whole way through. One of the funniest books I've read in years."
-Heather O'Neill, bestselling author of The Lonely Hearts Hotel and Lullabies for Little Criminals

"For all my fellow right-thinking adoring readers of Bunny, another dark and insane gem from Mona Awad, full of scintillating insights on Shakespeare, pain, and the human condition."
-Elif Batuman, Pulitzer Prize–shortlisted author of The Idiot

"Wild and exhilarating and so fresh it takes your breath away, All's Well is an utterly delicious novel of pain, Shakespeare, the uncanny, and our own subtle moral failures when we brush up against the anguish of others. Mona Awad's talent is so vital that it absolutely roars out of her."
-Lauren Groff, bestselling author of Florida and Fates and Furies

"Oh my lord what a fabulous novel-knocked me out!"
-Mary Karr, author of The Liars' Club

MONA AWAD is the author of Bunny and 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize that won the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, the Colorado Book Award, and an Honorable Mention from the Arab American Book Awards. It was also longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. The recipient of an MFA in Fiction from Brown University and a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Denver, she has published work in TIME, VICE, The New York Times Magazine, McSweeney's, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Boston.