Everything You Ever Wanted

Author Luiza Sauma
Narrator Stephanie Racine
Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
Run Time 9 hours and 40 minutes
Format Audio
Genre Dystopian and utopian fiction, Family life fiction, Modern and contemporary fiction, Narrative theme: Death, grief, loss, Narrative theme: Sense of place.

Get in the xigxag app

This book is not purchasable in your country. Please select another book.

Pre-order Buy Now £{{ price }}

How does xigxag pricing work?

Listen to a sample

What to expect

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Everything You Ever Wanted written by Luiza Sauma, read by Stephanie Racine.

You wake up. You go to work. You don't go outside for twelve hours at a time. You have strategy meetings about how to use hashtags. After work you order expensive drink after expensive drink until you're so blackout drunk you can't remember the circumstances which have led you to waking up in bed with your colleague. The next day you stay in bed until the afternoon, scrolling through your social media feeds and wondering why everyone else seems to be achieving so much. Sometimes you don't get out of bed at all.

Then you hear about Life on Nyx, a programme that allows 100 lucky winners the chance to escape it all, move to another planet and establish a new way of life. One with meaning and purpose. One without Instagram and online dating. There's one caveat: if you go, you can never come back.

But you aren't worried about that.

After all, what on Earth could there possibly be to miss?

Critics Review

Sauma skewers the falsities and disappointments of contemporary life and work with rare sensitivity, unfolding an evocative narrative of unearthly escape. I loved it
Megan Hunter, author of 'The End We Start From'
Every now and then, a book comes along and pins down the wild thoughts that have been circling around in your brain as you question the meaning of your life in the bath at midnight. Manages to sensitively unpack the frustrations of modern life while appreciating how funny the banality of it all is
Refinery29
An important and poignant novel that captures the ennui, panic and stubborn optimism of the zeitgeist with spirit, humour and a fearless portrayal of human truth
Helen Cullen, author of 'The Lost Letters of William Woolf'
Beautifully written . . . Everything You Ever Wanted explores our current obsession with a meaningful life
Bookseller
Everything You Ever Wanted is one of the most original and urgent novels I’ve read this year. Sauma dives under the skin of the way we live now and makes it into an astonishing new shape. Funny, heart-breaking and thought-provoking – a novel that talks about all the things we are most afraid to talk about. Read it!
Clare Fisher , author 'All the Good Things'
Sauma’s wondrous novel could not be more timely. Captures the era of social media addiction and status anxiety perfectly. . . . with echoes of The Truman Show and 1984
The Gloss
Uplifting, unputdownable and mordantly funny, Everything You Ever Wanted is the dystopian beach read you didn’t know you needed. It’s a love letter to London from outer space. It’s both a speculative dystopian drama and a deadpan office satire. It’s a brilliantly relatable and ambitious ode to the humdrum and the sublime; a truly original novel that captures the pleasures and displeasures of modern, earthly life.
Sharlene Teo, author of 'Ponti'
Everything You Ever Wanted is so sharp-eyed about our hidden hopes and tiny hypocrisies. Even the most fantastical elements feel painfully, perfectly true. I’d follow Sauma’s voice down any wormhole
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, author of 'Harmless Like You'
A daring and original novel that asks profound questions about the way we live today whilst being simultaneously playful and fun. Sauma is brilliant at nailing the details of contemporary life in a way that is recognisable to anyone who has suffered the mundanity of office jobs.
Laura Kaye, author of 'English Animals'
Courageous, haunting, and beautiful-with EVERYTHING YOU EVER WANTED, Luiza Sauma takes us on a breathtaking voyage through both the farthest reaches of space and the innermost depths of the human soul
Peng Shepherd, author of 'The Book of M'
Tinged with melancholy and yearning, this novel is wry and frequently beautiful, and its culmination is surprising and deeply moving
Guardian
What Sauma captures so excellently is the low level anxiety that hums through everyday life
Telegraph
Her writing is beautiful
Rachel Seiffert, author of Dark Room and A Boy in Winter
Weird, wonderful and beautifully written
Daily Mail
Sauma has the horrors of the workplace nailed with satirical precision
Sunday Times Culture
Absorbing and ambitious. Filled with sharp observations about the way in which we live now, Everything You Ever Wanted is both an acute satire of our social-media dominated times, and a haunting examination of depression and anxiety rendered in diamond sharp prose with barely a wasted word. . . It deserves to be on every prize longlist this year
i
For fans of Black Mirror
Elle
Millennial angst meets sci-fi
Stylist
Sublime
Otegha Uwagba, author of 'The Little Black Book'
An arresting debut about memory and trauma. In this respect and others, it resembles Julian Barnes’s Man Booker-winner, The Sense of an Ending.
Daily Telegraph on 'Flesh and Bone and Water'
Luiza Sauma’s debut novel is that rare thing: a completely absorbing, brilliantly-designed, literary work.
Anita Shreve on 'Flesh and Bone and Water'
Her writing is beautiful. I am sure I’ll see her name on the spine of many a novel to come
Rachel Seiffert, author of the Booker-shortlisted 'The Dark Room'

Subscribe to our newsletter

Sign up to get tailored content recommendations, product updates and info on new releases. Your data is your own: we commit to protect your data and respect your privacy.

Everything You Ever Wanted

Titles Purchased

Price p/Title

Listen to a sample

What to expect

Critics Review

More from the same

Author

Narrator

Subscribe to our newsletter