SOURCE: Grant, Katie. “More Four-Letter Words Than You Need.” Spectator 282, no. 8912 (29 May 1999): 40-1.

In the following review, Grant asserts that Kennedy discusses a variety of important topics in Everything You Need but stresses that Kennedy needs to further develop plot tangents and write in one clear literary style.

Finish your breakfast before reading this.

Things could be worse … stapling my scrotum to the flesh of my inner thighs and then performing Scottish country dances until I feel my socks congeal. I think that would be worse.

Thus we are plunged into the tangled and warped mind of A. L. Kennedy's hero, Nathan Staples, a novelist who writes about physical torture, deviancy and murder in order to assuage his anguish at losing the love of his wife and the giving away to a pair of Welsh homosexuals of his beloved daughter. The novel [Everything You Need] is about his...