This novel was read at Kalimna, Yeranda Cottages, Main Creek (Dungog) NSW, August 2026
The title of this remarkable novel is your first indication that there is something special in the offing.
I Love the Whole World! may sound like the exuberant, chemically-adjusted and enhanced exclamation of someone at a dance party, but the latest book from Victoria Hannan is far more than a celebratory blip at a well-resourced rave.
This funny, vivacious, delightful novel centres on a protagonist, Leslie McDonald, who, newly freed from a suffocatingly small “m” 24-year marriage to the very narrowly-minded Dennis, is itching to find herself again after adjusting without ceasing to her ex-husband’s endless demands to edit herself to his liking.
While not abusive in the usual DMV sense of the word, Dennis forced, and to be fair she acknowledges she acquiesced in the first full flush of love and then couldn’t work out how to stop, driven in part by the idea that marriage was supposed to be like this, Leslie to go ever smaller and give up the art she loved, the career aspirations she had, the sense of delight and fun that defined her as a teenager.
Instead of roaring into life with her best friend Jenny, whose younger brother Jeff describes her in the book as the one who carpe diem’d the hell out of life and who pushed his sister to be more, do more, Leslie quietly folded into the littleness of her husband’s frighteningly small world and gave up all the exciting things she had planned.
Leslie wanted to become a new person. Leslie wanted to open her heart, to roll back the stone and let the light in. Leslie was zombified by jet lag. Leslie was so tired she was letting her brain think utter nonsense, all the things she used to think that when she was with Dennis, she stopped herself from thinking.
While she doesn’t regret the birth of her daughter Melanie aka Moose, she does regret the timing of falling pregnant and wishes she hadn’t let herself think that this is as good as life gets.
When we meet the slowly re-blooming Leslie in I Love the Whole World! she just won an all-expenses paid trip to Las Vegas, something she imagines her physiotherapist ex, who ran off with her Alexander Technique (stiff posture always!), would have scornfully dismissed as something she would never do.
He would have said, she envisages in one of the ever-increasing moments where she thinks of him at all, that she was too lacking in imagination, in bravery, in a desire to well and truly suck the marrow out of life.
But Leslie is past caring and decides that she will go on the trip even when circumstances mean she has too go by herself and navigate her solo way through flights and immigration and new experiences by the gaudily fantastic metric ton in Las Vegas.
You can actually chart the way Leslie goes from excited but nervous at the start of the book to someone who, by its end has found that exuberance and devil-may-care-ness that defined her youth and which if left untramelled by the awful Dennis, would have seen her likely conquer the world of her own hopes and dreams.
Hannan’s beautifully nuanced writing charts this journey with such empathy and understanding that you want to hang in for every single step of Leslie’s casino-accompanied trip into a whole new her and a vividly alive new life.
I Love the Whole World! is a love letter to the power of being true to yourself and being brave to come alive again.
When you have let yourself become small and tucked away in the margins of life, and many of us have done that to greater or lesser extents, it is scary to even contemplate getting bigger and looking further again.
And, yes, Leslie is scared; but she’s also excited and expectant and alive once again to possibility and promised and it is an inestimable joy bearing witness to the way all that bravery finds fruition in the last city on earth you might send someone in need of a meaningful makeover.
Bali? Yes! India? Quite possibly. New York? How could you not be moved to do it your way?
But Las Vegas? Surely it’s too tacky and gaudy and shallow for any kind of epiphany that will help a lost and rudderless woman find herself all over again and realise that at 43, there’s still a lot of life to be lived and that it can be filled with art, and new food and people and places and things and it can all be … WONDERFUL.
Everything is a giddy, heartfelt joy to Leslie and much of the joy of I Love the Whole World! is being with her when Jeff, who now lives in Las Vegas with his lovely wife and two sons, takes herself to cutting—edge artworks out in the desert, reminding her of how much she loves art which is BIG and defines boundaries and Dennis-sized expectations.
She [Leslie] browsed through the hats and the t-shirts. Could she become a person who wears t-shirts of all the places she’s been? She didn’t see why not? At this stage, Leslie was realising that she could become any kind of person she wanted. She just had to work out who that was. Or not. She could be a chameleon, change as she needed to. She could become all people. Every person in the world.
Or when she goes to the Grand Canyon and discovers how majestically big and wide and awe-inspiringly beautiful it is; how can that not change you?
It certainly changes Leslie and each new dinner or breakfast or casino show or interaction with a bus or limo driver is another chance to be reminded that the world is diverse and wondrous and possible of delivering so much more than the 24 years of her stultifying would indicate.
Unlike some of the books in the reinvention of life genre, which are meant to be inspirational and kick you off to breathe new life into you vapid existence, I Love the Whole World! feels possible and real and absolutely able to exist in the real world.
Leslie does have all kinds of delightful epiphanies and they are as good for our souls as readers as they are for her, and you will laugh out loud with fizzy joy at how wonderful life becomes for Leslie, but it all exists within a world defined by a full-time job and a daughter who needs her mum.
Far from diminishing the epiphanies, they actually give them more life and bigness because thrillingly all the exciting and new things, and rediscovered old things like a fervent love of avant garde art, that come to define Leslie live and breathe and dance and grow in her everyday life, meaning they aren’t just holiday fantasies but things which can live and grow and be in amongst deadlines and morning alarms and family responsibility.
And that is what makes I Love the Whole World! feel so good for the soul, so giddily, happily, lushly and effervescently alive – Leslie not only finds her inner joy and purpose and path again but she gets to keep even after she leaves Las Vegas and goes back to Melbourne and that is perhaps the greatest and most enduring gift of all in a book deliciously and delightfully full of them.