All at Once

Elias’s brain is a swamp of fears and bad things. His once-loving brother Bo has become a stranger, and his parents are at breaking point. When Bo falls in with dangerous people, Elias decides he’s the only one who can bring his family back together. But what begins as a simple pizza-night plan quickly spirals into chaos.

This stunning debut novel from MBE award winning librarian Lucas Maxwell, inspired by the author’s childhood, explores themes of family addiction and Lucas’s own experience growing up with undiagnosed autism.

During a winter when the snow and ice storms extend right through to April, Elias’s family is being shattered like icicles hit with a baseball bat.

Deep crevasses are being driven into his once loving family unit. His older brother Bo is suddenly displaying aggressive behaviour, caused by his descent into the local drug culture. Their parents are constantly arguing over how to deal with the wayward teenager, and his dad’s long hours at work and his profession as a policeman in a small town is not helpful to the family’s situation. Elias cannot fully grasp what is going on with the older brother that he adores, but knows that things need to be fixed… and feels that it is his responsibility to bring his fractured family back together… even if his dad insists that Elias isn’t all there in the head.

His solution is to win the school talent contest with his repertoire of clever jokes, thinking that the free Pizza Hut meal, awarded to the winner, will glue his family back together.

In this short novel, Lucas Maxwell deftly explores human relationships, presenting his readers with a fascinating cast of characters each of whom are navigating their way through the missiles that life hurls at them. Elias is a character who will live long in readers’ hearts, with his single-minded determination to save his brother, regardless of the consequences for himself, and his ferocious and precise wit.