The Greatest Possible Good

For readers of The Bee Sting and Pineapple Street, an irresistibly funny and poignant novel about a wealthy family who are confident in their goodness – until their patriarch ruins their lives by giving all their money to charity.

Meet the Candlewicks.

Seventeen-year-old Evangeline (aka Dubbin) is a self-styled ‘radical activist’ who wants to change the world and despairs at the smug complacency of the rest of her family.

Emil is a painfully shy fifteen-year-old math prodigy who has just begun dabbling in drugs.

Their mother, Yara, arrives at airports four hours early and fears that AI and climate change will leave her children unemployed and unable to go outside for longer than ten minutes.

And Arthur, the father, a hapless and always neutral man who can’t decide if he is a good person or a doormat – forgiving and understanding, or weak and terrified.

Their comfortable lives are thrown into disarray when Arthur walks out into the woods one night for a stroll in his calfskin slippers only to fall down an abandoned mineshaft. Disoriented and unable to move, he remains there for three days with only a bottle of mid-range Bordeaux, his son’s confiscated stash of LSD and his daughter’s book on the concept of effective altruism for company.

When he is rescued, he is a man transformed. Determined to give away the entirety of his wealth and devote the rest of his life to the most worthy causes, his metamorphosis shocks his family and triggers a chain of events that will have far-reaching and unforeseen consequences for them all.

Equal parts skewering and achingly human, The Greatest Possible Good spans ten years in the lives of the Candlewicks as they struggle to come to terms with their father's good deeds, and introduces one of the most memorable and dysfunctional families in contemporary literature.