All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

In the heat of a west coast summer three very different women, each poised for success, find themselves failing spectacularly. Janice, a devoted mother and housewife who's approaching fifty, is cold-heartedly abandoned by her husband; her elder daughter Margaret, a magazine editor, is driven back home by towering debts; and her teenage daughter Lizzie is humiliated by the boys whose affections she has unquestioningly embraced.

At first they hide their downfalls - bankruptcy, addiction, promiscuity - from one another, but as the curtain-twitching world they inhabit begins to intrude, they find their secrets exposed. And in the midst of the manicured lawns and country club whispers, the Miller women cloister themselves in their suburban home and confront first their individual crises, then each other ...

All We Ever Wanted Was Everything is an astonishing portrait of modern-day women trying to stay afloat, of secrets and lies, and of what happens when the world you know comes crashing down.

Review: One family, three women and a whole heap of problems collide spectacularly in this highly accomplished debut. But the secrets and lies which shatter this cosy slice of suburbia resonate far and wide * Daily Mirror *

Three Californian women hold centre stage in this likeable tale ... The main characters are sympathetically drawn and their lives adroitly captured * Mail on Sunday *

A withering Silicon Valley satire . . . Brown's hip narrative reads like a sharp, contemporary twist on The Corrections. * Publishers Weekly *

Brown's beauty of a book believably puts it out there that you can go home again, but only if you're willing to genuinely care for and about each other * New York Daily News *

A brilliant and very readable portrait of the mother-daughter relationship * Candis *