Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Sep 2021
288 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
With the verve and bite of Ottessa Moshfegh and the barbed charm of Nancy Mitford, Marlowe Granados's stunning debut brilliantly captures a summer of striving in New York City.
Refreshing and wry in equal measure, Happy Hour is an intoxicating novel of youth well spent. Isa Epley is all of twenty-one years old, and already wise enough to understand that the purpose of life is the pursuit of pleasure. She arrives in New York City for a summer of adventure with her best friend, one newly blond Gala Novak. They have little money, but that's hardly going to stop them from having a good time.
In her diary, Isa describes a sweltering summer in the glittering city. By day, the girls sell clothes in a market stall, pinching pennies for their Bed-Stuy sublet and bodega lunches. By night, they weave from Brooklyn to the Upper East Side to the Hamptons among a rotating cast of celebrities, artists, Internet entrepreneurs, stuffy intellectuals, and bad-mannered grifters. Resources run ever tighter and the strain tests their friendship as they try to convert their social capital into something more lasting than precarious gigs as au pairs, nightclub hostesses, paid audience members, and aspiring foot fetish models. Through it all, Isa's bold, beguiling voice captures the precise thrill of cultivating a life of glamour and intrigue as she juggles paying her dues with skipping out on the bill.
Happy Hour is a novel about getting by and looking great in a system that wants you to do neither.
"[A] glamorous, intelligent debut novel...Like the many cocktails sipped by our discerning narrator: effervescent, tart, and intoxicating." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[A]musingly mischievous...This perfectly sums up a new age of innocence." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A dreamy account of one heady summer, Marlowe Granados's debut is a dispatch from another land; not only New York City, but youth itself. Happy Hour is aptly titled—it's an intoxicating book, at once heartbreaking and joyful." - Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind
"Happy Hour is filled with charm, memorable insight, and witty aperçus, adding up to the realization that life, while unfair, is antic enough to be worth all the trouble." - A. S. Hamrah, author of The Earth Dies Streaming
"Happy Hour is such a wonderful, hilarious, pleasurably exhausting reminder of what it is to be young in a big city. It's so much fun, a swig of a very cold martini on a balmy evening." - Megan Nolan, author of Acts of Desperation
This information about Happy Hour was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Marlowe Granados is a writer and filmmaker. She co-hosts The Mean Reds, a podcast dedicated to women-led films, and her advice column, "Designs for Living," appears in The Baffler. Granados currently resides in Toronto. Happy Hour is her debut novel.
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