International Acclaim for Katrina Onstad’s bestselling novel
EVERYBODY HAS EVERYTHING
Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize
A Globe and Mail Best Book of 2012
A NOW magazine Top 10 Book of 2012
An Amazon.ca Editors’ Pick, Top 100 Books of 2012
“Onstad makes a significant leap into the deep end with this story of a woman who has trouble coming clean with her husband, James, about the fact that she doesn’t want children. When she becomes the guardian of a friend’s son after a car accident, her conflict with gung-ho new dad James surfaces. Brave work from a writer who gets better with every book.”
— NOW magazine
“Utterly rich, vivid and filled with urgency. I couldn’t take my eyes off of these characters.”
— Kaui Hart Hemmings, author of The Descendants
“Onstad is good at shifting both emotional baggage and the weight of past experience between Ana and James and their respective histories, and among the book’s minor characters as well. She makes clear, through plot twists and occasional rumination, how past events tend to encroach on present problems.… Well executed … entertaining.”
— London Free Press
“Such a deeply impressive piece of work. I inhaled every page, feeling gut-punched by a writer willing to tackle such taboo subjects as the ambivalence of motherhood, the catalytic nature of children, and the restlessness of marriage. There are no unearned tears, nothing’s decorated, when I laughed or cried it was always for the same reason: painful recognition. Her characters demonstrate exactly what love does to us, in its awful absence and its glorious abundance. I loved this book.”
— Lisa Gabriele, author of Tempting Faith DiNapoli and The Almost Archer Sisters
“Revelations are both joyous and heartbreaking, and Onstad handles both aspects well.… The characters’ motivations, self-revelations, and discoveries are carefully elucidated, such that the reader is able to form connections not just with Ana and James, but with the supporting characters as well.… Onstad delicately builds up layers and peels them away.”
— Quill & Quire
“Katrina Onstad’s beautiful new novel is a clear-eyed look at an ordinary marriage under extraordinary pressure. Everybody Has Everything is about many things – family, friendship, responsibility, loss – but at its heart, it’s about what happens when the person you love suddenly veers off in another direction. It is unflinching yet tender, gripping and lyrical and devastating. I can’t stop thinking about it.”
— Lauren Fox, author of Still Life with Husband and Friends Like Us
“This new book is very good, to get that out of the way: Onstad’s writing is always vigorous, funny and mean-because-it’s-true.… [Her] books are similarly sharp and unforgiving about the agita ensured by years of cities and work and relationships, about making a life and making choices, and in the new novel, enduring the subsequent, ambiguous successes and self-fulfilling failures.… Onstad perfectly gets at her characters, [and] the rhythms of rich, white city parents, who used to be young and who have problems that are at once real and magical.”
— National Post
“What an interesting, vivid, utterly modern novel Katrina Onstad has written. I love how intelligently and precisely she explores James and Ana’s emotions around marriage, love, sex, work, ambition and parenthood. Everybody Has Everything made me both think and feel differently about my own life.”
— Margot Livesay, author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy
“With a keen eye for details of the contemporary good life, Katrina Onstad precisely delineates the crack in the vase of what appears to be a happy marriage. This is a book that challenges conventional wisdom about love and parenting and rising to the occasion in a crisis. And there is no way to predict the next turn of its events, which makes it a delicious read.”
— Carol Anshaw, author of Carry the One
ALSO BY KATRINA ONSTAD
How Happy to Be
Copyright © 2012 by Katrina Onstad
Original Emblem trade paperback edition with flaps published 2012
This edition published 2013
Emblem is an imprint of McClelland & Stewart, a division of Random House of Canada Limited
Emblem and colophon are registered trademarks of McClelland & Stewart, a division of Random House of Canada Limited
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Onstad, Katrina
Everybody has everything / Katrina Onstad.
eISBN: 978-0-7710-6879-9
I. Title.
PS8629.N77E93 2013 C813′.6 C2012-904052-5
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Song lyrics from “You Are the Light” copyright © Marvin Etzioni. Reprinted by permission of Marvin Etzioni; featured on the album Marvin Country! from Nine Mile Records.
McClelland & Stewart,
a division of Random House of Canada Limited
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www.mcclelland.com
v3.1
To Julian and Judah and Mia
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
The Day After Labor Day
Arrival
September
October
Halloween Day
Halloween Night
December
Late Spring
Acknowledgments
About the Author