Introducing Readers on Writers – the series where our shadow judging panel interview the shortlisted authors for the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award.
In this interview, shadow judge Nic Marna (@bookbinch) speaks to Ben Brooks about his shortlisted novel The Greatest Possible Good, published by Scribner. Their conversation explores how the pursuit of morality and inter-personal dynamics guided his writing process.
1. First of all, I want to congratulate you on your nomination! How does it feel to be celebrated as a young writer at this point in your career?
Thank you very much! It’s very flattering to still be eligible for a prize for young writers. And even more flattering to be shortlisted.
2. Could you tell us a bit about this book, The Greatest Possible Good, and how the Candlewick family came to be?
I’d been looking into the most effective charities to give to and came across effective altruism and the work of Peter Singer and William Macaskill, which led to organisations like Giving What We Can, where people pledge to donate 10% of their incomes to charity. From there, I got interested in people who literally give all they can, and how that might impact those closest to them. Hence, the Candlewicks reeling after Arthur’s moral reinvention.
3. In the novel, we get to be a fly on the wall over the course of the lives of all four family members; two teenagers rebelling in different ways, a retired mother with a complicated past and a father on the verge of a major life change. How did you navigate bouncing between these vastly different perspectives as the story unfolds?
I think each character is burdened by something that feels relatable to me in some way; doing too much, doing too little, being too self-absorbed, never putting yourself first. Being able to pursue each of these conflicting feelings to an extreme felt interesting to me. I think Arthur ends up getting the least amount of time in the book because his position is so straightforward: he believes that if we’re in a position of safety and security, we should give everything to those who are not.
4. Something I found particularly gripping in the novel is how it presents a family as people on parallel, yet separate, tracks (even comparing them to “businesses sharing space in a shopping arcade”). All the way to the end, I found it challenging the idea of blood being thicker than water. Why was writing this kind of family, this grouping of people, important to you?
As you said, the meaning of family varies a lot from person to person. For some people, it’s more important than almost anything, and for others, it’s nothing at all. A family probably has as much worth as its members are willing to invest in it, which becomes complicated if one person is trying to hold a family together, when no one else has much of an interest in participating.
5. Each of these characters has to parse through wealth, privilege, and all sorts of pressures to confront what being ‘good’ means to them. Did you learn anything about your own relationship to being good through writing this book?
It’s definitely tied into an ongoing process of interrogating why I feel certain ways about certain things, checking your values as they shift over time, trying to work out if you truly believe something or you’re using a belief to cloak self-interest. It can be easy to feel a certain way and simply accept it, resign yourself to it, only absorb information that confirms what you already believe. I’m trying to do that less.
6. You work in different mediums and genres, from children’s books to working in TV. I’m curious to know: How do you choose the right avenue for a specific idea or story when you are conceiving it?
Without being too cynical about it, I think if a story is really personal, it might be a good idea to write it as a book first. The process of making TV, especially in the streaming age, means stories are shaped by a lot of different forces beyond your control, which can get a little painful if the thing being reshaped is dear to you. From the first word to the last, a book is a series of your own decisions. Its faults are entirely your own, but any of its successes are too.
7. I loved the humour, the expansiveness, the cultural commentary, and the way these characters leapt off the page. Without setting this accomplishment aside, I’d selfishly love to know what we can look forward to reading next from you.
Oh, thank you very much! I wrote a film that should come out later in the year. And another novel will come out in 2027. It’s called Is Now a Bad Time? In quite drastically different ways, both deal with the impact of upbringing on our emotional lives as adults.