Angus is a reformed ne'er-do-well looking forward to the birth of his first child when he's murdered by a man who is in love with his pregnant wife Gracie. Having never believed in God, heaven or hell, Angus finds himself in the afterlife - a place that provides more questions than answers.
... wildly imaginative ... dark, twisted and hilarious ... Toltz is smart, imaginative and funny, unafraid to lob a literary grenade into hard-held beliefs of humankind. He uses Here Goes Nothing as a jumping-off point to parody the perversity and stubbornness of human nature and to highlight our uneasy relationship with mortality. Think of it as a comic, modern-day Divine Comedy with more intercourse and fewer opportunities to reach Paradise.
Toltz’s writing is at its most lyrical when discussing love in its various forms, even at its most destructive ... a thought-provoking work that’s perfect for anyone whose dim view of our planetary existence is tempered by hope in something better than a doctrinaire ending.
... a moving meditation on all that is wrong with our world today and an innovative take on the afterlife ... comes in at nearly 400 pages but reads shorter – one mark of a skilled writer. Another is that Toltz wears his existentialist subject matter lightly, with a tone that is heavily ironic, droll and bittersweet ... While some of the scene set-ups could do with pruning, the pace of both storylines zips along, in an energetic narrative full of unexpected twists ... Even in the direst of situations, all three characters have agency, another smart choice by Toltz ... The book is very funny, with plenty of slick dialogue and one-liners ... The philosophical musings imparted throughout are equally cavalier, and all the more affecting for it ... In its epic scope charting this life and beyond, Here Goes Nothing works as a smart social commentary on our fossil fuel-guzzling, warmongering, information-obsessed, pandemic-riddled world. It is a hugely timely book on the dangers of the way we live today, a dose of much-needed medicine sweetened with enough humour and panache to make it digestible.
