Is There Anything You Want?
  • Published: 3 April 2006
  • ISBN: 9780099472131
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $19.99

Is There Anything You Want?

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A characteristically compelling, clear-eyed, humane and heartbreaking novel about a taboo subject - and about what it feels like to be a survivor...

What do Mrs H., Rachel, Edwina, Ida, Sarah, Dot, Chrissie have in common? They're all women, but they're fat, thin, old, young, married or single - and appear as diverse as human nature can be. But they are all survivors. This enthralling novel follows the ripples that go out into ordinary lives that have been changed by a shared experience, all connected by the same hospital clinic in a small Northern town.

This is a novel about what it means to live in the shadow of disease, and with scars, whether mental or physical. From the marvellous ambivalence of the title question, it leaves us with a whole lot more to consider about life and its infinite variety.
  • Published: 3 April 2006
  • ISBN: 9780099472131
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $19.99
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About the author

Margaret Forster

Born in Carlisle, Margaret Forster was the author of many successful and acclaimed novels, including Have the Men Had Enough?, Lady's Maid, Diary of an Ordinary Woman, Is There Anything You Want? , Keeping the World Away, Over and The Unknown Bridesmaid. She also wrote bestselling memoirs – Hidden Lives, Precious Lives and, most recently, My Life in Houses – and biographies. She was married to writer and journalist Hunter Davies and lived in London and the Lake District. She died in February 2016, just before her last novel, How to Measure a Cow, was published.

Also by Margaret Forster

Diary of an Ordinary Schoolgirl
How to Measure a Cow
My Life in Houses
The Unknown Bridesmaid
Shadow Baby
The Memory Box
Isa and May
See all

Praise for Is There Anything You Want?

Written with enormous sensitivity and compassion

Red

The kind of novel into which you plunge with satisfaction

Sunday Times

Accomplished...moving

Times Literary Supplement

Forster excels at depicting ordinary lives.Beautifully controlled

Independent on Sunday

Forster's prose, is, as always, clear, robust and unpretentious

Daily Telegraph

Few authors share Margaret Forster's extraordinary ability to transform the ordinary day-to-day activities of unremarkable people into compelling fiction... Written with brilliant and exquisite sensitivity

Daily Mail

Insightful and intelligent

Woman & Home

Pristine writing

Time Out

Written with insight, wit and tremendous style

Spectator

Wonderfully comic and touching

Sunday Telegraph

The kind of novel into which you plunge with satisfaction

Sunday Times

Forster's empathy and lack of sentimentality, as well as her quick ear and eye for the telling detail, command attention, while her skills as a storyteller ensure the reader's avid curiosity about what happens next

Literary Review

Interweaves a variety of thoroughly imagined life stories and predicaments with quiet, effective skill

Mail on Sunday

I have greater admiration for Margaret Forster than for most novelists. A very fine, continuously interesting, and often moving work, all the better because it is so firmly rooted in the ordinary world of everyday experience

Scotsman
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