When Will There Be Good News?

When Will There Be Good News?

by

Kate Atkinson

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Themes and Colors
Trauma, Survival, and Reckoning with the Past Theme Icon
Appearances vs. Reality Theme Icon
Lies and Deceptions Theme Icon
Family Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in When Will There Be Good News?, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.

Trauma, Survival, and Reckoning with the Past

When Will There Be Good News?, Kate Atkinson’s 2008 mystery novel, is very much a survival story. Multiple characters—detectives Jackson Brodie and Louise Monroe, and especially crime survivor Joanna Hunter and orphan Reggie Chase—carry memories from traumatic events and are coming to terms with how their pasts impact their relationships with others in the present. By focusing on the struggles of Joanna and Reggie to deal with their respective pasts, Atkinson argues…

read analysis of Trauma, Survival, and Reckoning with the Past

Appearances vs. Reality

In When Will There Be Good News?, many characters feel like misfits in their surroundings, cross socio-cultural boundaries, and forge unlikely personal ties in an effort to find meaning in their lives. Sometimes characters embody unusual contrasts, such as Reggie’s bookishness amidst poverty, and Joanna Hunter’s underworld ties amidst middle-class gentility. These improbable boundary-crossings often signal an unresolved tension in a character’s life.  Through such contrasts—both relatively innocent ones like Reggie and darker ones…

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Lies and Deceptions

Throughout When Will There Be Good News?, characters’ relationships are marked by dishonesty: lies, omissions, and deceptions of various kinds. Often these deceptions are part of the way characters represent—or fail to represent—their own lives to one another. For instance, Reggie doesn’t tell Dr. Hunter about her criminal brother, Billy (“She hadn’t lied, she had simply left him out of the story of her life”),  and Dr. Hunter never mentions her troubled past to…

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Family

All of the book’s major characters have suffered through major dysfunction in their home lives—often involving the traumatic deaths of loved ones. Reggie, Jackson, and Joanna all long to piece back together the families that were taken from them when they were young, and they each do this through the means most readily available to them—whether through jobs, childbearing, or even detective work. Through the characters’ various attempts to reconstruct their broken families…

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