Goodness isn’t a quality widely promoted in our culture. Since western society succumbed to advertising, we’ve become convinced we’re important, significant and deserving of whatever we desire whenever we desire it.

The last few decades have also seen the beatification of naughtiness and sin. Being bad – as long as ‘no one gets hurt’ – is not only acceptable, it’s attractive.

Yet if you did a snap poll most people would consider him or herself inherently good.

Katie Carr, the narrator of Nick Hornby’s latest novel, is such a person. She frequently describes herself as a ‘good person’. It’s a refrain chorused throughout the narrative.

Her criteria for goodness are fairly simple. She’s a doctor – a noble profession. She’s a mother, too. And, until recently, she’s been a faithful wife.

Her husband David, however, isn’t so good. He swears, he complains and he works as a freelance writer. He’s also the primary cause of her angst. David is a cynical embittered sort of bloke. An indication of his personality is the name of his column in the local paper – ‘The Angriest Man in Holloway’.

After years of marriage, a mortgage and two children, Katie and David have settled into a pattern of sniping and sneering at each other. David’s latest ploy to annoy his wife is to visit a crank healer named Good News to fix his chronic back pain. Breathtakingly unqualified, Good News (GN) charges a whopping 200 quid for his brand of quackery which, much to David’s surprise, actually works.

This encounter is something of a Damascus Road experience. He becomes converted to the notion of doing good. He stops berating his wife. He looks for the good in people. He gives money away.

Some of this Katie can cope with. But then David shifts up a gear. He gives their son’s computer away. He invites GN to live with them. He tries to enlist their neighbourhood to share their homes with street kids. David’s whole life begins to revolve around his strategies for doing good and being good.

There’s no religious or spiritual element to David’s newfound desire to help his fellow man. He just considers it the right thing to do. Yet the more he commits himself to his task the worse things become for his family.

What he discovers is that it’s hard to embrace goodness in a spiritual vacuum. Simply deciding to be good isn’t enough to make a person good.

David isn’t alone in his discovery. Towards the end of the novel Katie realises that she isn’t quite as blameless as she thought. That she is lacking something within herself.

“When I look at my sins … I can see the appeal of born-again Christianity. I suspect that it’s not the Christianity that is so alluring; it’s the rebirth. Because who wouldn’t wish to start all over again.”

At times abrasive and offensive, How to be Good is also a startling and entertaining read. It’s provocative and thoughtful, laying out ideas at the very heart of our humanity.

Hornby’s style is brisk, almost breathless. The dialogue and narration gallop along at such a cracking pace that it’s sometimes difficult to keep up.

We become Katie Carr’s confidante – a role which includes hearing all manner of things (including a frank discussion of her sex life) that we may prefer not to know.

A biting satire, How to be Good is not without humanity. A surprising and diverting novel from a popular storyteller.