The path to grace, though, is strewn with obstacles and challenges. The obsessive island-dwellers are trying to cure themselves through trial by extremity while, over in London, Nathan's editor, only friend and one link with his literary career -- the brilliant, loyal, hopeless Jack -- is drinking himself into the ground. And Mary herself is torn, emotionally, between familial love for the two uncles who brought her up in loco parentis, and the beginnings of a romantic, sexual life beyond.

With this third novel, A. L. Kennedy has written a work of something approaching genius: its surface bright with turmoil and damage, its depths profound and turbulent. A brilliant examination of human frailty, cut through with bitter, helpless comedy and agonising grief, Everything You Need is a novel about a man who has nothing, a man who will only be healed when he finds the lost Grail he once held in his hands: the ability to give and receive love.