Don't read this if you suffer from panic attacks, substance abuse or are feeling down. Some reviews state that this is a funny, hunourous book. I didn't find that all and I'm a big fan of gallows humour. It's just exhausting and draining reading about Gilda and the scenes from her life that jump about manically (like her brain). She is a very damaged and vunerable person. She is on first name terms with the local A&E staff as she constantly visits in a state of anxiety about her health and the prospect of dying. She can't get the energy to wash up a dish but manages to inadvertently get a job as a receptionist at a Catholic church (when she thought she'd be attending a therapy group), makes an email friend with an elderly parishioner, goes on dates with an unattractive man (despite being a lesbian) and so on. Gilda is so damaged that the "scrapes" and situations she finds herself in aren't amusing, just indicative of the chaos that is her life.

A brilliant new voice in fiction, and I can't wait for more. The protagonist was so original in her voice and opinions, I was compelled to love her! It was such a readable look, and I loved how it touched on mental illness too. I This is a relevant title that a lot of our customers will appreciate, and I can't wait for it to be published!

Gilda, a twenty-something atheist, animal-loving lesbian, cannot stop ruminating about death. Desperate for relief from her panicky mind and alienated from her repressive family, she responds to a flyer for free therapy at a local Catholic church and finds herself being greeted by Father Jeff, who assumes she’s there for a job interview. Too embarrassed to correct him, Gilda is abruptly hired to replace the recently deceased receptionist Grace.

The reader is thrust from scene to scene, rushing to try and keep up with Gilda. We are inside her head, flitting from person to place, trying desperately to stay present and aware while feeling utterly hopeless. Austin's use of skittish, start-stop and sometimes breakneck pacing was sublime and communicated such vital parts of Gilda's character with no words wasted.

This story was so incredibly readable, This is a first for me by the author and one I enjoyed and would read more of their work. The book cover is eye-catching and appealing and would spark my interest if in a bookshop. Thank you very much to the author, publisher and Netgalley for this ARC.

Everyone in this Room is a smart contemporary novel, skirting that thin line between 'hecking bleak' and 'undignified-snort-of-laughter humour'.

For a book about existential dread, it also has a lot of heart, and Austin's pitch-perfect prose means that those moments of joy and humour really shine through. Gilda is a brilliant protagonist: quirky, bewildering and extremely relatable. Her first-person narration reads like one long panic attack, but with a self-awareness that just about keeps you from slipping under.

The comparsions to Fleabag and Eleanor Oliphant are well-deserved - Everyone in this Room is an irreverant and touching debut.

Genre: Literary Fiction | LGBT+ Fiction | Adult Fiction

Release Date: 8th July 2021

Trigger Warnings: Anxiety, Panic Attacks, Addiction, Injury, References to death, murder and suicide.

Gilda doesn't want to die - but she can't stop thinking about death. How it works, how inevitable it is, and most of all about how one day something is going to kill her and everybody she cares about. And seeing as she's on first-name basis with most of the local emergency room, she is keenly aware of the many things that could do it.

Existential dread aside, Gilda is breaking under the pressure of her own growing anxiety and of her overbearingly repressive parents and their expectations. On a whim, she decides to attend a free therapy class at a local choice and finds herself in the peculiar situation of accidentally replacing their recently deceased receptionist, Grace. Not the most ideal job for a lesbian atheist but she needs a job anyway and she has gotten very good at pretending.

Amongst getting to grips with her new life, navigating the waters with her almost girlfriend and finding herself deeply invested in finding out what really happened to Grace - Gilda has a choice to make. Finally learn to live her own life, or just waiting around until the day she dies.

"I have to make money to pay my rent, and buy food, and sustain my existence because that is the purpose of my life."
Everyone In This Room was uniquely compelling and engaging, with Gilda capturing my attention within moments of being introduced to her. Suffering with her own mental health issues and societal pressures, she openly shows us the side of mental illness that is usually covered up - the instability, the unreliability, the unrest.

Gilda has two voices - her rational and her irrational, both living in uncomfortable harmony with one another, giving us a deep insight into her mind. This book delves into some dark places, and handles them all brilliantly while still keeping up that morbid humour that made this book so iconic.

Dryly witty and darkly funny - this is a heartrending exploration of the human condition and odd comfort in knowing that some time in the future, everyone in this room will someday be dead.



RATING: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐



Thank you to Emily Austin and Atlantic Books for an ARC in return for an honest review.

Everyone in This Room Will Someday be Dead is a really unusual book with a unique voice.

It’s actually nothing like what I was expecting when I picked it up. From the description and the cover, I was expecting a wry, dark comedy. Everyone in This Room Will Someday be Dead does have some funny moments, but it leans for more into the darker side of Gilda’s experience. She’s down on her luck, struggling with hypochondria, depression, anxiety and a difficult family life.

For me, the most striking aspect of the book was the way that it was written. Not exactly a stream of conciousness novel but going somewhere along those lines. The narrative has a disjointed quality as Gilda’s thoughts flit from her current situation to memories of the past and back again. It was a bit confusing at first and took me a while to get used to, but it adds a claustrophobic, too-fast anxiety to the reading experience, which perfectly mirror’s Gilda’s own distress as she spirals through her daily interactions.

Everyone in This Room Will Someday be Dead is an interesting read. As Gilda tries to not only get her own life on track, professionally and personally, she also begins her an investigation into the suspicious death of the woman who’s job she’s taken. In so many of the situations, you sort of watch through your fingers, whispering at her not to do the thing, and knowing it’s all going to bite her on the ass somehow. Being in Gilda’s head so deeply gives you the feeling like when you do something yourself that you just know you’re going to regret.

Definitely an original read.

Oh my goodness WHAT a book! I consumed it in 24 hours (unusual for me). It was heartfelt, gripping and emotional. The author communicates Gilda's depressed and confused mindset in a way that makes her sympathetic and fascinating. Absolutely brilliant.

Sadly Everyone in This Room Will Someday be Dead doesn't bring anything new to the directionless-young-woman-spends-all-her-time-navel-gazing-under-the-torpor-of-ennui subgenre. At times, Austin's brand of cringe comedy tried too hard to be cringey, so much so that I ended up not buying into a certain scene or character.
Gilda, a recently unemployed twenty-something lesbian, is obsessed with death. Her preoccupation with death is such that she thinks of it all the time. For instance, when sitting on a chair she wonders whether the people who sat on it before are dead. She envisions terrible scenarios, in which she or someone else dies. At times she suffers from panic attacks which lead her to make frequent visits to her hospital. No one seems to notice how disconnected Gilda is from her everyday life. As with all the other alienated millennial women populating these novels, Gilda seems unable to perform even the most basic of tasks. She's too depressed to wash herself or the dishes, she often forgets to reply to her maybe girlfriend and seems painfully unaware of the world around her. She has many surreal conversations with others, who often seem blind to Gilda's depression and anxiety.
Gilda unintentionally lands herself a job as a receptionist at Catholic church where she discovers that her predecessor died. Gilda, being death-obsessed, tries to learn more about this woman.

The way the story is presented to us really grated me. On one page there could be three separate paragraphs, each one focusing on a different conversation/moment of Gilda's life. We then end up with one simple dialogue, say between Gilda and that Giuseppe guy, dragging on for pages, and being interrupted by Gilda's conversations with the people from the church or her family. I just found this style choppy and artificial, better suited to a tv show than a book. Speaking of tv shows, this novel tries really hard to be something in the realms of Fleabag, but whereas that show does a fantastic job in making absurd conversations or ott characters seem believable, here, I just did not buy into what I was reading. For instance, that whole Giuseppe thing was just unnecessary. The guy is the classic fitness-crazed wannabe guru that is a dime a dozen on YouTube and social media. And he speaks in this very contrived way, 24/7. Austin's character lacked nuance, finesse, whatever you wanted it to call it. Giuseppe could have been funny but Austin is too heavy-handed, and the result is an unfunny caricature. Gilda's parents are also painfully one-dimensional. They get barely any page-time and even when they appeared they remained amorphous. Gilda's mother is relegated to the role of mom, and her father is just a generic dad. The scenes they were included in were just there to show how unfair they are to Gilda. While I could believe that some parents would wrongly blame one child instead of the actual guilty child, the way this played out here was just incredibly unrealistic (I am talking about that 'get out' scene). It was so unbelievable that it really pulled me out of the story. The maybe girlfriend is just as generic as Gilda's parents. She makes very few if any appearances and mostly sends texts to our mc asking what she's up to or whatnot.
A character that had the potential was Gilda's brother, but, ultimately I didn't like how the story handles him (how delusional is Gilda to think that leaving him a message like that could magically cure his alcoholism and, as Giuseppe would say, 'live his truth').
The people at the church where Gilda works were uninteresting. They are old and think that the internet is a magical and mysterious place. Because they are old you see. Old people don't know anything about the internet as Austin reminds us so many times.
Gilda herself was just exhausting and I cared little for her. She overanalysis everything around her, and while at times her observations could amusing or feel authentic, for the most part, it was just boring being in her head (for instance when she goes on about she's had her hands for her whole life and that they fed her everything she has ever eaten so far). Rather incongruously the author seemed to be rying to make Gilda ultra-relatable by making her think or say these trivial things while at the same time emphasizing how different Gilda is from those around her.
The setting of this story is so generic that I could not tell you where it takes place. America? Canada? Australia? Maybe this was mentioned once somewhere in the novel but the author doesn't really depict Gilda's environment. A counterargument to this could be that Gilda is too wrapped up in her own head to observe her surroundings, but, what about My Year of Rest and Relaxation? The narrator there is decidedly inward-looking and spends most of the book in the confines of her apartment and yet the author there manages to really give us an impression of the place (New York) and time (2000-20001) the story is taking place in.
All in all, I found this novel to be more of a flop than a hit. Maybe I have read too many books that feature aimless alienated women in their twenties but, in comparison to My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Luster, and Pretend I'm Dead, Everyone in This Room Will Someday be Dead is quite forgettable.

CN: mental illness (anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts). Possible off-page cat death (which I would have appreciated knowing beforehand).

“It’s easy for me to accept that I am bacteria, or a parasite, or cancer. It’s easy for me to accept that my life is trivial, and that I am a speck of dust. It’s hard for me to accept that my brother’s life doesn’t matter, or that old women who die don’t matter, or even that rabbits or cats don’t matter. I feel simultaneously intensely insignificant and hyperaware of how important everyone is.”

I’ve spent the past few days inside the head of a young woman called Gilda and, while I may be ready to leave, I don’t think she’ll be leaving me for a while. This idiosyncratic little book, equal parts charming and disturbing, is told stream-of-consciousness style, in Gilda’s very distinctive voice. Gilda is an atheist, gay, depressed, riddled with health anxiety. Gilda struggles to do what she needs to in order to thrive. She forgets to text her girlfriend back, and thinks a lot about a rabbit she had as a child. Gilda falls into a receptionist job at a Catholic Church, a series of dates with a Catholic man (who happens to be the worst kind of Instagram guru, an absolutely delightful detail) and even, sort of, a murder investigation. Her story is one that will take you to unexpected places, even without once leaving her head. It’s not for everyone, sure, but if you relate, you’ll relate hard.

Review of an e-arc, thanks to Netgalley and the publisher.

Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead by Emily Austin is a wonderfully written novel about a woman with health anxiety. Quirky and touching. I would love to read more from this author.

Ahhhh I loved Everyone in this room will someday be dead! It encapsulates exactly what feeling depressed is like and I think will be relatable for a lot of people. A very zeitgeisty, millennial book.

I am going to give it four stars because the cohesion of the narrative didn’t always flow; I know this might be a stylistic choice but I found it to interrupt the overall effectiveness of the novel.

All in all, a definite book for our times and one I will recommend as a best book so far of 2021.

I’ll admit I wanted to read this because of the title alone - but it was definitely a good decision.
I loved and was immediately drawn into the writing style, and Gilda was a fascinating narrator. The story was a really interesting insight into a differently working mind than my own, with some beautiful existential thoughts.

This book is an anxiety attack on a page and I had to stop reading at some point to give my poor adrenal glands a break. I wasn't sure if I'd be able to finish, despite loving it, so I give a genuine content warning for anyone whose anxiety may be triggered by reading the perspective of a character who is essentially suffering a slow burn panic attack throughout her narrative.

As I said, however, I did love this and think it's fantastic, and that's mostly because of the fantastic narrative voice of poor Gilda.

Atlantic have really been knocking it out of the park recently, they're pretty much an auto-click for me at this point.

My thanks to Atlantic Books and NetGalley for the ARC.

This was a very quick read that I did enjoy, although for some reason I had expected more. A tale focusing on a depressed, extremely anxious lesbian atheist who takes a job at a Catholic Church and becomes obsessed with the dead secretary she has replaced seems to have black humour written all over it. Yet I genuinely found a lot of it to be quite depressing (perhaps I’m actually too similar to Gilda myself... I understand that she suffers from a lot of intrusive thoughts but I certainly could have done without the repeated references to cats dying in house fires). I feel like the book cover and marketing of this novel is aiming for Exciting Times etc whereas the tone is perhaps a tad more Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine.

Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead tells the story of Gilda, a gay atheist in her late twenties. Suffering from acute anxiety, she approaches an address for therapy only to find herself accidentally accepting a job in a Catholic church. Gilda is an enchanting and charming creation. She is intensely endearing and her anxieties, insecurities and uncertainties are entirely relatable. Austin writes about queerness and depression with warmth and wit and manages to spin a mystery out of it too. Every character is well observed and drawn with a lightness of touch which belies its skill. There were moments of laugh out loud humour as well as moments which were profoundly sad and tender. The tone is somewhat reminiscent of 'Where'd you go, Bernadette', although Austin's voice is all her own and Gilda a unique and delightful character.

Thank you to NetGalley and Atlantic Books for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This book by Emily Austin is certainly original with a complex but endearing main character in Gilda. It wasn’t really my cup of tea but I did enjoy reading it in parts. It mixed the banal with the dark clouds in Gildas head in all areas of her life including her job,where she took over a role vacated due to an untimely death. This book gave us humour with an insight into Gilda mental health problems.

This book is endearing, sentimental and humorous - even though its serious and worrying at times. What if???? One of life's great questions. I'm a very positive optimistic person but I really related to Gilda - in her what some might call ''craziness'' about doom and gloom scenarios.Life and its uncertainties can be scary - how many times do see horrible stories in the news and if we were caught up in something similar.Don't we all think about parents/friends/ourselves dying... even though we know death and taxes are the only certainties .Don't we all think 'what if??? .... I fell while waiting for the underground ... or was in an accident in the car ... or in a plane.. on a train-- maybe we're all a little crazy about life - our zest for it or our lack of it.. Our gratitude or disregard for it.
It's written in a stream of consciousness - apparently random thoughts jutting up against each other as Gilda hazily glides through her days.. I think is representative of more people than we think -- she's lost her mojo and given up a bit -and let herself go..She doesn't ask for help, agrees to things that are just easier than explaining.. and is a hypochondriac/or not? who seeks constant medical attention.. Yet people still give her a chance and she ends up flourishing. You see how she relates to her normal /dysfunctional family depending on how you see it. No-one really wants to address life's difficult questions, challenges or problems eg death,alcoholism, sexuality,religious beliefs, family problems, preferring to gloss over them..But as she takes a seemingly incompatible job in a Catholic church and ends up wondering about who murdered the woman who se job she's now doing - someone she doesn't even know she shows ''empathy'''' kindness ''or some might say ''duplicity'' in trying to protect others from the harsh realities of life and taking all the burden on herself .
It's sobering and exaggerated but I enjoyed it.

This book is a new all-time FAVOURITE. Following Gilda's perspective throughout this novel was a delight. I fell in love with her. I LOVE HER.
Gilda's fixation on death is incorporated seamlessly into the narrative, harshly grounding her story in reality. This effectively contrasts the out-of-body feeling that Gilda experiences at many points throughout the novel. As her state of mind flip-flops around, so does her perception of events. Times shifts and warps around her and big chunks of her memory begin to disappear. Her voice was so sharp and memorable, now carved into my brain forever.
A big part of this story is mental illness; Gilda suffers with extreme anxiety as well as depression and dissociation (undiagnosed on-page). For me, this novel depicted living with these (untreated) conditions beautifully. Austin gave Gilda her very own "anxiety/depression voice" that ran alongside her own thoughts. Gilda's rational, witty internal monologue battling her intrusive thoughts/intense worries constantly. I think this would make her narration of the story quite taxing to get through, where it not for the...
IMPECCABLE PACING! The reader is thrust from scene to scene, rushing to try and keep up with Gilda. We are inside her head, flitting from person to place, trying desperately to stay present and aware while feeling utterly hopeless. Austin's use of skittish, start-stop and sometimes breakneck pacing was sublime and communicated such vital parts of Gilda's character with no words wasted. It also made this book read (and feel?) like a thriller.
This story was so incredibly readable, it had so much momentum and intrigue. I loved the sprinkling of gayness and the depictions of intense love. Gilda's wit made me cackle heartily and often, and when she was ignored or dismissed or not appreciated I cried buckets for her.
I love you Gilda, be my wife.

Thank you ever so much to the publisher for this e-arc!!

Trigger Warnings: intrusive thoughts (graphic), suicidal thoughts and attempts, death of a pet (on page), homophobia, self harm, suicide (off page, relatively unexplored side character).