All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

When life breaks you, who can you count on to pick up the pieces? One day is all is takes for three women's lives to come undone...

One family, three women and a whole heap of problems collide spectacularly in this highly accomplished debut. But the secrets and lies which shatter this cosy slice of suburbia resonate far and wide

Three Californian women hold centre stage in this likeable tale ... The main characters are sympathetically drawn and their lives adroitly captured

A withering Silicon Valley satire . . . Brown's hip narrative reads like a sharp, contemporary twist on The Corrections.

Brown's beauty of a book believably puts it out there that you can go home again, but only if you're willing to genuinely care for and about each other

A brilliant and very readable portrait of the mother-daughter relationship

Brown's winning debut teaches a hopeful truth: Sometimes, just as you're starting to drown, things fall back into place.

Part Desperate Housewives, part American Beauty - entirely gripping

A razor-sharp critique of the absurd expectations that, these days, have come to stand for ambition, "All We Ever Wanted Was Everything" is wrenching, riveting, and still manages to be great fun. This is a wise, intimate chronicle of one family's struggle to take off their masks and live in the place they most feared: the real, imperfect world

Meghan Daum, author of 'The Quality of Life Report'

Rarely does a first novelist write with such confidence and grace. 'All We Ever Wanted Was Everything' is a marvelous book

Ayelet Waldman, author of "Love and Other Impossible Pursuits

Janelle Brown is a Los Angeles-based freelance journalist. Having spent four years as a senior writer at Salon, she currently writes for the New York Times and Vogue, amongst others.

Janice Miller knows this: she loves her husband, her two spirited daughters and the beautiful home in which she has raised her family. But what she doesn't know is how to stay afloat when a devastating discovery tears that familiar world apart. 
 
It is only once the damage has been done that she finally realises how distant her daughters have become - and that schoolgirl Lizzie and 28-year-old Margaret now have dark secrets of their own. After years of following separate lives, they are reluctantly drawn back together under the same roof.It's the outside world that has unravelled their dreams, but what they all fear most now is each other. Yet it's there, in the family home, that they are forced to confront their crises - and where, slowly, each of them begins to heal.

Janelle Brown

Life is beautiful for Claudia and Jeremy. They are a young, bohemian couple whose hard work in both the film and music world is finally paying off. Claudia's first film is in the can and Jeremy and his band are going places. Now seems like the perfect time to settle down and buy a house. 
 
But this is summer 2008, and the credit crunch is round the corner. In a matter of weeks Claudia's film becomes a box-office flop, Jeremy's band stalls and - worst of all - they find themselves unable to pay the mortgage, with the bank threatening repossession. The life they've been dreaming of comes tumbling down around them. Claudia takes a teaching job in attempt to placate the bank, and suddenly everything their relationship has been built on looks precarious. Jeremy sees her 'selling out' as a betrayal of their bohemian values, and when his glamorous ex-girlfriend Aoki, a famous painter, returns to LA, Claudia starts to realise that her relationship is in danger of disintegrating unless she does something to save it...

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