Happiness and Love

Synopsis

Years after escaping her unbearable artworld friends in New York for a new life in London, an unnamed writer finds herself once more at their dinner table for a single, hideous evening.

It’s the day after the funeral of their mutual friend, a failed actress and – Eugene and Nicole, an artist-curator couple – are hosting a dinner party. If the narrator once loved and admired the couple and their important friends, she now despises them all.

Most of all, however, she despises herself for being lured back to this cavernous apartment, to this hollow, bourgeois social set, for a dinner party that isn’t even being thrown in their deceased friend’s honour, but in the honour of an up-and-coming actress who is by now several hours late.

As the guests sip at their drinks and await the actress’s arrival, the narrator, from her vantage point in the corner seat of a white sofa entertains herself – and us – with a silent, tender, merciless takedown.

A satire about friendship, capitalism, culture, and art, Happiness and Love is the razor-sharp new novel from an exciting literary voice.

Author

Zoe Dubno is a writer from Manhattan who lives in New York and London. She has an MFA from Rutgers University, Newark. Her fiction has appeared in Granta.