I Want You to Be Happy: A Novel

I Want You to Be Happy: A Novel

• A tender, witty, and sharp debut novel about the passions and peculiarities of modern love, by an extraordinarily gifted writer (Sally Rooney).
  
  Chuck and Joey meet in a bar. Hes in his mid-thirties; shes twelve years younger. He long ago abandoned his ambition of being a novelist and works as a copywriter at a big ad agency. Lead copywriter, he corrects himself. Joey is living paycheck to paycheck on her barista wages and privately dreams of making it as a poet. They go back to Chucks luxury flata world away from Joeys cramped house-share, the crumbs in her bed. Soon, Joey is imagining a future between them and Chuck is moving on from a mistake in his recent past. Amazing, how meeting a new person can make you feel so new.
  
  Funny, excruciating, and true, Jem Calder'sI Want You to Be Happyis a sharp-eyed tale of two people searching for meaning and connection in modern times, missing the mark maybe, but still trying.

  Jem Calderwas born in Cambridge and lives and works in London. His fiction has been published inThe Stinging FlyandGranta. He is the author of the short-story collectionReward System.

  A totally devastatingand all too relatableportrait of modern romance.Barry Pierce,Vogue (UK)
  
  Calders characters feel startlingly (and, at times, infuriatingly) real . . . Sparse and exacting, Calder has a remarkable way of capturing the complexities of dating, relationships, and simply existing in the 2020s . . . A clever, wry, and hyper-realistic portrayal of contemporary life.Kirkus
  
  I Want You to Be Happyis an irresistible novel that asks complex questions about contemporary life and refuses easy answers. I couldn't stop reading.Sally Rooney
  
  Jem CaldersI Want You To Be Happybrought me so close to its characters that their world became more real to me than my own. This is a gripping, wise, sad, funny book. It pays such close attention to the textures of life as it's actually livedin all its in-between moments and unspoken feelings and ambivalence, its blackouts and needy texts and ambushes of tenderness. Jem Calder feels like a particular kind of wizard, sculpting precisely-realized moments of aliveness that feel, at once, startlingly lucid and radiant with mystery. I was utterly enthralled.Leslie Jamison, author ofSplinters
  
  I became totally invested in this. An elegant and disquieting vision of contemporary pain.Saba Sams, author ofGunk

• Calder, Jem
• ISBN: 9780374620554