Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC.

This isn't a beach read - you need to really concentrate on Austin's writing to get the full effect of this novel. However, if you can cope with the slightly disjointed, stream-of-consciousness of the narrative, there's much to savour about this book. The depiction of mental health is well done from several different angles, and Gilda's job as the receptionist at a Catholic Church also allows for some commentary on contemporary religion, especially in relation to women's and LGBTQ+ rights. I can't say I really enjoyed it, but I'm glad I read it.

I enjoyed it, though it was a fairly depressing read. The main character was well fleshed out, and I was rooting for her throughout.

Everyone in this Room will Someday Be Dead is an interesting novel about a girl called Gilda. Gilda appears to have an OCD, she is fatalistic and obsessive. As a young gay woman you would hardly find her to be working in a church but by chance she finds herself getting a job there. What unfolds is a mystery and the actions of a self-destructive characters.

I would be lying if I said I loved this book but I did like Gilda as a character and I enjoyed going on her journey with her.

Everyone in this Room will Someday Be Dead by Emily Austin is available now.

For more information regarding Atlantic Books (@AlanticBooks) please visit www.atlantic-books.co.uk.

🌿BOOK REVIEW🌿

Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead by Emily R. Austin

Gilda cannot stop thinking about death. She feels overwhelmed with her active, anxious mind and is desperate for a reprieve. When she finds a flyer offering free therapy at her local church she decides to give it a go, only she ends up being hired as the new receptionist- what could go wrong?! Oh I forgot to mention… Gilda is queer and atheist.

Written in a stream of consciousness, Austin perfectly shows how consuming and draining an anxious mind can be. The book has some hilarious moments with Gilda’s dead pan thoughts about her surroundings and the situations she finds herself in! Saying that, it does have its sad and reflective moments as Gilda is struggling with her everyday relationships, and finds herself in the local A&E department regularly due to her anxious mind.

I absolutely adored this fast paced novel that is centered around such a relatable, realistic main character! The writing made it very difficult to put down as you are thrown from scene to scene so quickly!

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/5

⚠️TW// intrusive thoughts, suicidal thoughts and attempts, homophobia, animal death

Great premise but failed execution.

Gilda is a young woman who is a hypochondriac, suffers from anxiety, depression, and obsesses over death. Too much for one character? Now, just you wait.
She is in a car accident, injures her arm, does not report the incident to the police or insurance despite being stopped at a red light. Adulting these days…
She takes a job as a church administrative assistant and starts dating a man who is a life coach. But she’s a gay atheist, SIKE! Spoiler, her girlfriend is not happy.
She then becomes obsessed with the death of a 86-year-old whose job she took over. If you think the plot is now thickening, you’re going to be disappointed.

I wanted to relate or at least comprehend the main character so much, but so many things were thrown in from the get go I just couldn’t care about Gilda.
The narrative does not help either; a jumpy staccato of mundane observations that neither drive the story or build/deepen the characters.

Thanks for the advanced copy which (clearly) did not influence my review.

‘Are you okay?’

It is a question that Gilda, the main character and narrator of Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead is asked a lot. She’s asked it by people at work. She’s asked it by her maybe-girlfriend. She is asked it by her brother, the receptionist at the hospital, the janitor, the nurse. A lot of people ask Gilda if she is okay, but few of them seem to actually care about the answer. If they did, perhaps they’d know sooner just how depressed, anxious and detached from the world Gilda actually is.

Gilda, twenty-seven and extremely mentally fragile, is depressed and anxious, suffering from panic attacks, intrusive thoughts, and obsessive behaviour. She is obsessed with death; her own, those of the people she loves, the cat across the street, her childhood rabbit. When she loses her job and accidentally ends up as a receptionist at a Catholic Church – despite being a lesbian atheist – she becomes obsessed with the maybe-murder of the sweet old lady who held the post before she did. In the meantime, she is trying to deal with parents who refuse to see that Eli, her younger brother, has a serious substance abuse problem as well as his own myriad of mental health problems, and juggle her relationship with her maybe-girlfriend.

Gilda’s story is, to put it lightly, a lot.

If that quick plot summary sounds a bit heavy then you aren’t wrong, but you should know that Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead is also very funny. The humour is pitch black, of course – think Fleabag – but it does provide some moments of relief in a narrative that would otherwise be almost unbearably heavy. Gilda’s employment in the Catholic Church is, at times, a good old-fashioned farce as she tries her best to blend in, despite not even knowing that stealing communion wafers is probably not a good idea. As it is, the novel is still quite difficult to read in places but the humour does some heavy lifting.

At the most basic, this is a novel about mental health. Aside from Gilda’s many problems, there is the fact that Eli abuses alcohol and is probably also depressed. Her dad has clearly been depressed in the past and may still be. Austin doesn’t shy away from the depicting any of this for her readers; Gilda’s intrusive thoughts are genuinely frightening at times, and the depiction of panic attacks are so well drawn that at times it feels voyeuristic to be experiencing them alongside Gilda. It isn’t really hard to see why Gilda is so obsessed with death when her panic attacks make her feels as though she is dying; her constant visits to the emergency room might be frustrating for staff in the hospital, but if Gilda feels as though she is dying every time then can you blame her? Austin treats all of these issues very fairly; although Gilda knows on some level that she is being paranoid, Austin doesn’t judge her for it.

And another thing worth mentioning, I think, is how good a person Gilda is. She feels as though she isn’t very good, but she spends the novel desperate to find the cat, Mittens, who went missing when the house across the street caught fire. Long after everyone else stopped looking, she still went searching for him. She was very kind to her rabbit, Flop, when she was a kid. She’s loving and as gentle as she knows how to be with her brother, Eli, even when he doesn’t deserve it. She corresponds with the elderly friend of the dead receptionist because she can’t bear the thought that the old lady will be sad. Austin presents us with a character who struggles so much with herself and her place in the world, but underneath it all she wants us to know how good Gilda is.

Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead is a hard read, but also a very kind portrait of how mental health problems might cause someone to struggle – but it doesn’t define who they are.

I really enjoyed my time with this novel!

Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead is a novel in the vein of Sally Rooney. The writing feels very similar - the kind of apathetic main character, it almost feels like she is not an active participant in the novel, which is something that I really enjoy.

This novel tackles many aspects of mental illness - from anxiety (including panic attacks), to depression, depersonalization/derealization - and treats them with a lot of respect. I appreciated that not only the common sides were shown, but also side effects of anti depressants, pushing other people away. It doesn't shy away from showing any of that, even if it's not glamourous.

I found that I really appreciated a lot of the conversations, especially towards the end. It was a very wholesome ending and one that I honestly really appreciated.

Everyone in this Room Will Someday be Dead isn’t the snappiest of titles but as it focusses on atheist, hypochondriac Gilda who suffers from extreme social anxiety and depression it seems somewhat apt!

Getting inside Gilda’s head is tricky but author Emily Austin paints a realistic and sad picture. Parts of Gilda’s character feels very relatable, and then there are some choices she makes that have you cringing in frustration. There’s a dark humour running through the piece – it isn’t laugh out loud funny, but it is amusing in parts and this helps engage you into the plot. I think the blurb touting it as ‘hilarious’ is a bad misstep in setting expectations for the reader that the book can’t meet though.

As far as plots go not much really happens throughout – there’s a slight mystery solved but it’s more about the journey and the characters. The ending does spiral a bit as Gilda becomes less hooked into reality. I was expecting a massive twist such as Gilda becoming an unreliable narrator and turning everything we had been told on its head. Once I’d had this idea, the actual ending was a bit of a let-down and felt rushed unfortunately!

Overall, Everyone in this Room Will Someday be Dead is a dark tale of anxiety and depression but without a solidly anchored plot ultimately feels a little unfinished. Thank you to NetGalley & Atlantic Books – Atlantic fiction for the chance to read the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This was a pleasant surprise to read and a perceptive take on what it can mean to be human. Gilda’s inflated anxieties are remarkably relatable and her character, although consumed by a relentless preoccupation with death, is peculiarly and undeniably charming. The book manages to teeter brilliantly between both the comical and the more tender moments in life combining a snappy dialogue with Gilda’s obsessive thoughts of death, the world that surrounds her and her place within it. What Emily Austin manages to capture in Gilda stays with you long after having finished the novel.

This was a quirky, comical and satisfying novel with a great character who was so well-drawn, I felt I knew her well (and missed her even more when she had gone). Brilliant.

Thanks to NetGallery and Atlantic Books for providing access to this ARC.

DNF'd at 30%

I thought that my opinion was being skewed by this being an uncorrected proof. But having checked other reviews, I've realised my thoughts aren't.

It really is a case of this book just isn't for me.

The premise of this book sounded like something I could really get behind. A dark humourous look at death, anxiety and an individual trying to keep their true self hidden. As someone diagnosed with General Anxiety Disorder, I was interested in seeing how the author handled the character's anxiety and if it would be similar or different from my own experience (as I realise not all experiences are the same).

Instead what I found was an interesting character trapped in a confusing time jump trail from paragraph to paragraph of a book.

I feel like this could work if the book was structured slightly better. Even just some more separation pointers could help with this. I think it's meant to portray the fractured mind of Gilda and how her anxious thoughts makes her tangent. However, the way the book just jumps from topic to topic with just one line break and no obvious transition just made the reading experience bare line unbearable for me.

Even trying to think of this book as a TV show swapping from scene to scene failed to help me in the end.

The writing style also feels disjointed to me. Some paragraphs feel really well written and then others are really basic in structure and wording, leaving me feel like it was a first draft waiting to be made a little more descriptive. It added to the feeling of slight bafflement and I'm not sure if this is another choice the author made. Or these sections will be edited and be different in future versions.

Which is sad, as I really loved some of the points in this book. I also did like Gilda despite her being what I think of as a rather grey morality character; she will lie at the drop of a hat and doesn't seem to feel much remorse in doing so.

The side characters felt like they could be fun, though one was a bit annoying. I was intrigued by some of the side plots but even though I do want to know what happens, it's not enough to push me through.

In terms of the humour, I didn't really see it. I found it more of a downer. I don't mind black humour but it felt more like Gilda continually falling into catastrophing, which can happen with anxiety sufferers and I just don't find funny.

Overall, I feel like this book will find its audience and there are people out there who will connect much better. Sadly, I'm not part of them.

Gilda is a twenty-something lesbian atheist, who can't stop thinking about death and has just been in a minor car accident. In order to find some calm, she responds on a whim to a flyer advertising support meetings at a local Catholic church, and accidentally becomes employed as the Church's new secretary. The previous post-holder recently died, so when the Church's inbox receives an email from this woman's friend, Gilda pretends to be her in order to avoid sharing the bad news about her friend's demise (it makes sense to Gilda!).

Amongst all this, Gilda is attempting to commit to a relationship with Eleanor whilst trying to avoid a set up with a congregation member's brother and ignoring the growing tower of dirty dishes in her apartment... Add in a gentle bit of sleuthing and you've got quite a layered novel!

This was a great book, lots of dark humour and spot on observations of a young person desperately ill with depression and anxiety but who is trying so hard to 'be normal'. I loved the character of Gilda and really cared for her. As someone who hasn't suffered from anxiety or overthinking it was a really fascinating insight into how someone's mind can work against them. The observations/commentary from Gilda about what it's like working as a receptionist/secretary were really funny - as someone working in office administration/assistant work, much of it chimed true! 

This book won't be for everyone, there are references to suicide/self-harm and Gilda is not always a cheerful soul! I'd recommend to readers who enjoyed Normal People, The Bookish Life of Nina Hill and Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine. 

Thanks to Netgalley for the advanced copy!

I received a copy of this book through NetGalley.

Everyone in this room will someday be dead follows the life of Gilda. Gilda is an atheist and a lesbian but somehow finds that she's stumbled into a job as a receptionist at a Catholic church. Filling in following the mysterious death of her elderly predecessor, Grace, Gilda finds herself spinning tale after tale to keep the people around her happy. All the while Gilda finds herself spiraling deeper and deeper into apathy and depression as she struggles to find meaning in a world that ends in the blackness of death. As the mystery surrounding Grace's death begins to unravel alongside Gilda's own mental state and her relationships, Gilda is confronted with the idea of living despite the existential dread caused by the reality that everyone dies.

I found this book a quick and easy read but didn't find it especially thrilling. The story arc times was kinda disjointed and weird, I never quite knew what the plot was, Some of the lines really resonaated with me but on but, this book is told in four parts and in fragments. It makes it not really cohesive though it's not hard to follow and is a quick read. It wasn't a bad book but also It wasn't great either, I originally requested this book because the tightly stood out to me. I thought it was going to be a comedy filled with dark humour but that was not the case,

Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead isn't the most uplifting book but is really quite good. We follow the story of Gilda, who is not having the best time and struggling with a bout of depression and anxiety. Currently unemployed, and having a car accident - it's just not going well for her at the moment.
She somehow comes across a job at a church, whilst being an atheist lesbian who is rather obsessed with death.
Quite funny in places and did make me chuckle. A really unique storyline and great characterisation!

I really enjoyed this book. Found it easy to identify with Gilda and her anxiety even though I'm nowhere near as anxious myself. This book was lighter in tone than I thought - which I liked - and a lot more fun. I would definitely choose books by this author again.

A wonderful, farcical, entertaining story of a woman obsessed with death. I’d say at times, but mostly through the book is a slow ever present panic attack as we follow Gilda through many laughable situations!!
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With heart warming lovable characters I thoroughly enjoyed this read, even though it did centre highly around death haha, I didn’t see the ending coming but had a big old smile on my face when it did. I enjoyed the humour level of this book, I wouldn’t say I was hysterically laughing but found I had a constant smile on my face!!
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Thanks to Netgalley and Atlantic Books for the ARC!!

'Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead' is a marvellously funny, yet also heartbreaking, story of Gilda, a young woman trying to find her way in the world. Desperate for a job, and suffering from crippling anxiety and panic attacks, Gilda finds work as a receptionist in a Catholic Church. The only problem? She is a gay atheist. Added to her problems is the issue of her predecessor, a woman who may or may not have been murdered. I thoroughly enjoyed inhabiting Gilda's head, seeing the world from her skewed perspective. Her character was flawed, yet so loveable, and the supporting cast were believable and well constructed. I look forward to reading more by Emily Austin in the future.

I adored this book so much! Although it is marketed as a darkly funny book, I would caution the reader that this is in fact a rather dark, bleak read and, while I agree the narrator can be very funny, the story itself is so claustrophobic and Gilda puts herself in such agonizing, cringe-y and outright terrible situations due to her declining mental health, that some parts were really difficult to read. I find it hard to recommend this for everyone because of this, but Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead was nevertheless such a great read, impossible to put down as the events snowball into impending disaster - reading this felt exactly like all my fears when I am anxious coming true. So while I disagreed with most of Gilda's actions, I felt like I understood her and could not be upset at her obvious self-sabotage. This is one of my favorite "disaster woman" trope books of all time.

It's a great idea but fell short on the execution for me. It either needed to be funnier or more acutely observed. DNF

At times this novel made me laugh out loud, but at others it veered into the ridiculous. There have been quite a few novels in this millenial-woman-struggling-to-engage-with-life trope recently, this is certainly not unique.
The writing about depression, anxiety and panic attacks feels very authentic though. There is lots to relate to here and she's a character that sticks with you. I can see how it will divide readers into those who get it and those who don't.