When Will There Be Good News?

by Kate Atkinson

When Will There Be Good News? is the brilliant new novel from the acclaimed author of Case Histories and One Good Turn, once again featuring private investigator Jackson Brodie.

Thirty years ago, six-year-old Joanna witnessed the brutal murders of her mother, brother and sister, before escaping into a field, and running for her life. Now, the man convicted of the crime is being released from prison, meaning Dr. Joanna Hunter has one more reason to dwell on the pain of that day, especially with her own infant son to protect.

Sixteen-year-old Reggie, recently orphaned and wise beyond her years, works as a nanny for Joanna Hunter, but has no idea of the woman’s horrific past. All Reggie knows is that Dr. Hunter cares more about her baby than life itself, and that the two of them make up just the sort of family Reggie wished she had: that unbreakable bond, that safe port in the storm. When Dr. Hunter goes missing, Reggie seems to be the only person who is worried, despite the decidedly shifty business interests of Joanna’s husband, Neil, and the unknown whereabouts of the newly freed murderer, Andrew Decker.

Across town, Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe is looking for a missing person of her own, murderer David Needler, whose family lives in terror that he will return to finish the job he started. So it’s not surprising that she listens to Reggie’s outrageous thoughts on Dr. Hunter’s disappearance with only mild attention. But when ex-police officer and Private Investigator, Jackson Brodie arrives on the scene, with connections to Reggie and Joanna Hunter of his own, the details begin to snap into place. And, as Louise knows, once Jackson is involved there’s no telling how many criminal threads he will be able to pull together — or how many could potentially end up wrapped around his own neck.

In an extraordinary virtuoso display, Kate Atkinson has produced one of the most engrossing, masterful, and piercingly insightful novels of this or any year. It is also as hilarious as it is heartbreaking, as Atkinson weaves in and out of the lives of her eccentric, grief-plagued, and often all-too-human cast. Yet out of the excesses of her characters and extreme events that shake their worlds comes a relatively simple message, about being good, loyal, and true. When Will There Be Good News? shows us what it means to survive the past and the present, and to have the strength to just keep on keeping on.

Kate Atkinson was born in York in 1951, where her parents ran a surgical supplies shop, and spent a lot of time reading as a child. She’s even commented that being an only child and learning to enjoy her own company, combined with her love of books, probably helped prepare her well for the solitary life of the writer. Atkinson then attended the University of Dundee, where she studied literature and completed a doctoral thesis on the history of the short story form, and came close to pursuing an academic career. However, it was when she left the university and began writing fiction as an escape from the day-to-day domesticity of child-raising and home-making that the seeds of Atkinson’s true calling appeared — the first story she ever sent off for consideration won a major prize, the Woman’s Own Short Story Competition. As she’s explained in one interview, “That was how I became a writer, really. It was a very slow burn. That was from first putting pen to paper around 1982 to winning that competition in 1986 to a novel being accepted in 1994.” That first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, went on to win the prestigious Whitbread Prize for Book of the Year in 1995.