Summary and Reviews of It's All Right Now by Charles Chadwick

It's All Right Now by Charles Chadwick

It's All Right Now

by Charles Chadwick
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  • Critics' Consensus (5):
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  • First Published:
  • May 1, 2005, 667 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Jul 2006, 704 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

In this remarkable debut novel, Charles Chadwick has created one of the most memorable, brilliantly realized characters in contemporary fiction - by turns poignant, funny, heartbreaking, and profound.

Meet Tom Ripple, a man with an uncommon outlook on his common life. At home in a North London suburb, Ripple keeps close tabs on his neighbors while his own family splinters apart. As the years pass by he forges on, bravely and awkwardly, in his relationships with his wife and children, his parents, girlfriends, colleagues, and friends, and in his ongoing search for certainties, both moral and practical.

But what he gains in wisdom over time, he loses in love, as his marriage disintegrates and his children grow further away from him. The more he lives and the more he learns, the less he understands.

Through the vividness of his voice and his growing sense of the sorrow and absurdity of the world, Tom Ripple becomes an unusually appealing anti-hero, aware of his ordinariness and the limits of his intelligence, with a ribald sense of humor, and a clumsiness in his attempts at emotional connection with others. He is a bewildered everyman navigating his way through modern times.

In this remarkable debut novel, Charles Chadwick has created one of the most memorable, brilliantly realized characters in contemporary fiction. By turns poignant, funny, heartbreaking, and profound, It's All Right Now is a towering achievement and a singular work of the imagination.

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Reviews

BookBrowse Review

BookBrowse

If you expect intense action in your reading matter then it would be best if you moved swiftly past It's All Right Now. However, if you've enjoyed the subtle pleasures of books such as William Boyd's Any Human Heart or John Lanchester's Mr Phillips, then you should take a close look at this one...continued

Full Review (262 words)

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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).

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Beyond the Book



This first novel by 72-year-old retired civil servant Charles Chadwick caused quite a ripple pre-publication as much for the age of the author as for the book itself.  It's All Right Now is Chadwick's fifth novel but his first to be published (he received nothing but rejection slips for the others).  When Chadwick received the news that his novel had received advances worth several hundred thousand dollars he said "I am utterly astonished - The phrase 'beyond my wildest dreams' has now taken on ...

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Read-Alikes

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    A moving, ambitious and richly conceived novel that summons up the heroics and follies of twentieth-century life.

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