SOURCE: Mundy, Toby. “Novel of the Week.” New Statesman 128, no. 4437 (24 May 1999): 49.

In the following review, Mundy notes the boldness of the content and prose in Everything You Need but argues that the novel's dreariness weighs down the story's plot.

Nathan Staples is a successful writer of gory splatter novels. He is also possessed of a powerful impulse to self-mutilation and suicide, as his mind spends its days circling “the shameful hollow of himself”. For the last few years, Nathan has lived on Foal Island, a writer's colony and religious retreat off the Welsh coast. He is tortured by the departure of his wife and young daughter 15 years previously, neither of whom he has seen or heard from since. He lives alone, but shares the island with five other writers, among them a performance poet with a shark fixation; a depressed crime novelist with a deformed arm; and Lynda...