Nick Hornby: How to Be Good

How to Be Good is a 2001 novel by the English writer Nick Hornby. It centers on characters Katie Carr, a doctor, and her husband, David Grant. The story begins when David stops being “The Angriest Man In Holloway” and begins to be “good” with the help of his spiritual healer, DJ GoodNews (who also shows up briefly in Hornby’s A Long Way Down). The pair go about this by nominally convincing people to give their spare bedrooms to the homeless, but as their next scheme comes around, “reversal” (being good to people one has not been good to in the past), this proves to be fruitless and thus David gives up his strivings and his plans for a book on how to be good, appropriately named “How to be Good.”