Everyone and Everything (Nadine J Cohen, Pantera)

Nadine J Cohen’s debut novel, Everyone and Everything, opens with 34-year-old Yael Silver swimming at a women-only ocean pool following a recent suicide attempt. The pool, built deep into a cliff face, becomes a place of refuge and healing for Yael, and it’s here that she befriends Shirley, a woman twice her age. Their friendship is a joy to experience, comprising tender exchanges and blatant oversharing, as Yael introduces Shirley to brash colloquialisms, Costco and some truly terrible erotic literature. We gradually learn Yael’s history through memories and interactions with other loved ones—psychiatrist Priya, Yael’s closest friends and her sister Liora’s young family. Yael is no stranger to death and trauma: her father passed away a decade earlier, followed by her mother from cancer, and, most recently, she has lost her Jewish grandmother, a Holocaust survivor. Thanks to Cohen’s close narrative style, sharp observations and cutting dialogue, Yael is a brilliantly realised character. Her sardonic humour and scathing witticisms offer both reader and the novel’s characters cathartic relief, a way of processing complex emotions and ideas that can be difficult to speak about. A stunning debut, Everyone and Everything is an intimate and sensitive exploration not only of grief and inherited trauma but of love and loss, success and failure, and all the things that make us who we are. Readers who like Emily Maguire or Laura McPhee-Brown are sure to enjoy this book.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Jacqui Davies is a freelance writer and reviewer based in South Australia. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

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Category: Reviews