SOURCE: Charles, Ron. “No Man—or Writer—Is an Island.” Christian Science Monitor 93, no. 164 (19 July 2001): 18-19.

In the following review, Charles commends the adept symmetry of delicacy and harshness in Everything You Need.

How quietly, how quickly A. L. Kennedy has taken a place in the pantheon of contemporary novelists. In America, she remains something of a treasured secret, but in Britain, this 36-year-old Scottish woman has already racked up a half dozen impressive awards. She's even served as a juror for the Booker Prize.

Her latest novel, Everything You Need, is unlikely to change her position on this side of the Atlantic. It's marvelous and horrendous, full of extraordinary insight and sensitivity, but burdened with enough depravity to repel the larger audience she would otherwise attract.

This strikingly odd story revolves around two related activities: writing and parenting, sources of mingled pleasure and despair for Nathan Staples...