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The Surprising Life of Charlie Glass (size 18 and a bit)
The Surprising Life of Charlie Glass (size 18 and a bit)
Jul 18, 2025 12:32 PM

Author:Angela Woolfe

The Surprising Life of Charlie Glass (size 18 and a bit)

It’s fair to say that Charlie Glass is carrying a little excess baggage - emotionally and physically.

For years her excess weight means she’s been the butt of her skinny stepmother and half sisters’ jokes, and she’s had enough.

So, after a few weeks at a boot camp, Charlie returns slim, gorgeous and ready to run the shoe firm that, to her sisters’ annoyance, she has inherited from their beloved father. And when she bags a glamorous boyfriend, her transformation is complete.

Life is almost perfect (skinny stepmother aside), but her best friend Lucy seems resentful, Ferdy, the man she has secretly adored for years, apparently preferred her the way she was, and the constant battle to stay thin and beautiful is torture.

Would it really matter if the weight crept back on? There’s only one way to find out.

Reviews

A romantic and funny battle-of-the-bulge read for every woman living in fear of the scales

—— Closer

Curl up with this novel for an afternoon of comfort reading

—— Daily Mail

This modern retelling of the Cinderella story is great fun

—— Sunday Mirror

Lighthearted and satisfyingly witty

—— Wales on Sunday

If you've struggled with your weight, you'll identify with Charlie Glass

—— Yours Magazine

A puzzle box of a novel as fascinating as the clockwork bees it contains.

—— Erin Morgenstern, author of The Night Circus

Wildly imaginative novel is enough to tie the brain in knots; it's a comedy, a thriller, a crazy fantasy ... Harkaway has created a wonderfully entertaining, unguessable kaleidoscope of a novel.

—— Kate Saunders , The Times

This brilliant, boundless mad genius of a book runs on its own frenetic energy, and bursts with infinite wit, inventive ambition and damn fine storytelling. You finish reading it in gape-mouthed awe and breathless admiration, having experienced something very special indeed.

—— Matt Haig, author of The Radleys

Another fizzingly imaginative melodrama…A wildly, irrepressibly exuberant new-weird/ fantasy/ thriller /comedy.

—— Daily Mail

It's an ambitious, crowded, restless caper, cleverly told and utterly immune to precis...[Makes] Don Quixote look sedentary ... a very timely novel about belatedness...Joe is in one sense a 21st-century everyman, indebted to a previous generation, disenfranchised by a conspiratorial state... Angelmaker turns out to be a solid work of modern fantasy fiction, coupling credit-crunch anxiety with an understandable nostalgia for the mythical days of "good, wholesome, old-fashioned British crime".

—— James Purdon , Observer

A story of technology and morality. It's a wonderfully strange, rich piece of work - extremely entertaining and exciting - and has a wonderfully comic aspect to it as well.

—— William Gibson , New York Times

[a] dazzling story..a witty and wonderfully sprawling fantastical thriller.

—— Irish Times

Utterly now

—— Claire Allfree , Metro

Ambitious, assured and ruthlessly controlled…exhilarating

—— Richard Beck , Prospect

How Should a Person Be? is a question to be revisited by the author herself, or another writer, or many other writers – but it’s also the question novels were invented to respond to… Sheila makes it ugly to clear a space: for novels to be less fictional, for women to dream of being geniuses, for a way of being 'honest and transparent and give away nothing'

—— Joanna Briggs , London Review of Books

A timely, gloriously messy, openhearted, clever and beautiful new thing

—— Dazed & Confused

An unconventional blur of fact and fiction, How Should a Person Be? is an engaging cocktail of memoir, novel and self-help guide

—— Grazia

A candid collection of taped interviews and emails, random notes and daring exposition…fascinating

—— Sinead Gleeson , Irish Times

Provocative, funny and original

—— Hannah Rosefield , Literary Review

A serious work about authenticity, how to lead a moral life and accept one’s own ugliness

—— Richard Godwin , Evening Standard

An exuberantly productive mess, filtered and reorganised after the fact...rather than working within a familiar structure, Heti has gone out to look for things that interest her and "put a fence around" whatever she finds

—— Lidija Haas , Times Literary Supplement

A sharp, witty exploration of relationships, art and celebrity culture

—— Natasha Lehrer , Jewish Chronicle

[Sheila Heti] has an appealing restlessness, a curiosity about new forms, and an attractive freedom from pretentiousness or cant…How Should a Person Be? offers a vital and funny picture of the excitements and longueurs of trying to be a young creator in a free, late-capitalist Western City…This talented writer may well have identified a central dialectic of twenty-first-century postmodern being

—— James Wood, New Yorker

Funny…odd, original, and nearly unclassifiable…Sheila Heti does know something about how many of us, right now, experience the world, and she has gotten that knowledge down on paper, in a form unlike any other novel I can think of

—— New York Times

Playful, funny... absolutely true

—— The Paris Review

Sheila's clever, openhearted commentary will draw wry smiles from readers empathetic to modern life's trials and tribulations

—— Eve Commander , Big Issue in the North

Amusing and original

—— Mail on Sunday
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