Kako biti dobar

By choosing Katie as the narrator of his new, heartbreakingly real and endlessly funny novel, How to Be Good, Hornby has taken a big risk compared to his usual reader. Katie doesn't follow football, doesn't listen to records, and has been unable to finish Captain Corelli's Mandolin for months. Her husband David happily supports himself by writing a column for the local newspaper, "The Angriest Man in Holloway," while for years he has been scribbling away at his own never-ending novel. David is acerbic, perpetually angry, a master of manipulation and well-intentioned arguments. Their two children are becoming spiritually completely distant creatures before their eyes. Katie, frustrated to the core, urgently needs a lifeline from a stagnant marriage that has no future, while her conscience tells her that a good person should not destroy a family. But after her first adultery, Katie will utter the fateful words on her mobile phone from a Leeds car park: "I want a divorce." If you think you know where Hornby will take you from there, you are sorely mistaken; the unpredictable, elusive and unsinkable Hornby will first make you laugh out loud, and then, when you realize how painfully true his prose is, your laughter will get stuck in your throat. How to be good truly asks that question, without empty moralizing, without pseudo-intellectual babble and without hypocritical liberalism. Nick Hornby in the Croatian translation by Vladimir Cvetković Sever is our worst nightmare. He holds a mirror in his hands, but it is not magical, it only shows us as we really are. Hilarious horror!