I Want Everything by Dominic Amerena

There was a lot of buzz around this book's release, and the (beautiful) cover art made me request it. The premise is also promising: an unnamed writer with writer's block who has taken to undergoing medical clinical trials to make money spots a reclusive Australian writer, Brenda Shales, by chance at a swimming pool, realising that the chance of a lifetime is in front of him, he does some (fairly basic) investigating and he's able to find the aged care facility Brenda is now living at and with some (very good) luck manages to gain access to Brenda.

This was a very rare thumbs down for me. It felt pretentious and over hyped to me, or maybe it was the choice to not include speech marks in the text? I Want Everything raises interesting questions about who owns a story and what happens when ethics and ambition clash. It has a tangled web of lies and layers of unreliable narrators, potentially the only reason I finished it.

Body count = 0.

Thanks to Netgalley and Simon & Schuster (Australia) for giving me the ARC of I Want Everything by Dominic Amerena to read and review. I wish I liked it more. I deliberately left this review until after the book's release.

I Want Everything is out now. Some very well-loved authors (Bri Lee and Sofie Laguna, to name two) have given this book brilliant reviews, so read some of those reviews before deciding if this book is for you.

If you've read it, let me know what you thought!

@netgalley @simonschusterau

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When this drops in Aus on 30 April I think there will be some serious buzz…and, I imagine, some polarising reactions to it - can’t wait to see what others make of this!

I WANT EVERYTHING is Dominic Amerena’s debut novel. Our narrator is a writer in a rut while his girlfriend’s own writing success is beginning to soar. By chance he spots a famous enigmatic Australian writer, now elderly, at the local swimming pool, who’s been a recluse since her rise to fame and following a legal case accusing her of plagarism many years earlier. He finds himself dipping into the moral grey before diving into full blown deception and depravity to find out what happened to her, share her story and produce the work that will surely skyrocket his career.

We watch on as he weaves himself a web of lies that becomes more tangled the more he uncovers her story. And the TWIST! Oooft, I won’t say any more but I thought it was brilliantly done.

Not only was I treated to a deliciously dark thrashing of the Australian literary scene, this also threw up so many interesting questions and ethical conundrums as I tore through its pages - whose story is being told, who owns it and who gets to tell it? What steps would you take to tell it? Is it ever too late to turn back?

I suspect the main protagonist’s POV will grate on a lot of people - I found him so insufferable at the start that I was ready to give up. I really think it pays off to keep going though - this is whip smart with all of the layers that were so addictive to unpeel and sit (however uncomfortably) with. A really solid Aussie lit debut and can’t wait to see what else Amerena has in store for the future.