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A Novel
by Amber Sparks
In Amber Sparks' highly anticipated debut novel, a reclusive mother and her saturnine daughter move into a haunted building brimming with eccentrics―and secrets.
Just past the edge of summer, Alice and Fern arrive at the Pine Lake Apartments―a former sanitorium occupied by an ensemble of peculiar neighbors and a smattering of ghosts. Among the living: a professional mermaid, a handyperson moonlighting as a medium, and an awkward professor of medieval studies. For the determinedly private Alice, Pine Lake seems the perfect place to hide herself and her daughter―until the day Fern finds a dead body in the dumpster. Intent on solving this mystery, and dodging warnings from her increasingly paranoid mother, Fern's investigation digs up long-buried secrets that implicate each of her neighbors ... and conjures a new party from beyond the grave. A darkly funny gothic tale, Happy People Don't Live Here is an unforgettable novel from a "master of the fantastic" (Roxane Gay) that takes a sharp look at love, family, and the sometimes-dangerous myths we make for ourselves.
"Sparks works within a highly stylized mix of quirky and eerie—but from within her own idiosyncratic vision, she celebrates the power and strangeness of weird women and girls. For anyone who has ever wished they made Nancy Drew novels for grown-ups." — Kirkus Reviews
"Playful...beneath the spunky girl detective plot is a finely crafted novel about fraught relationships, both between a mother and daughter and between the living and the dead. It's a cozy supernatural delight." —Publishers Weekly
"Amber Sparks is one of my favorite living writers, and Happy People Don't Live Here is just as searing, funny, and unforgettable as I hoped. In the world of Amber Sparks, ten-year-old girls are extraordinary and ghosts are regular as rain. This is an enthralling novel about how mothers haunt their daughters and vice versa, and the beautiful fact of love after death. Alice and Fern feel like they have always existed and always will. Get ready for your new favorite novel." ―Marie-Helene Bertino, author of Beautyland
"Strange and surprisingly uncanny, Amber Sparks's new novel is a twisty, delicious trip down the rabbit hole. Every family story is a haunted house, and this one gives us everything spooky and so much more. A beautiful book, and a slippery one, too―Sparks has built something terribly, wonderfully fascinating with Happy People Don't Live Here. A stunner." ―Kristen Arnett, author of Stop Me If You've Heard This One
This information about Happy People Don't Live Here 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.
Amber Sparks is the author of the short story collections And I Do Not Forgive You and The Unfinished World. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, Slate, and elsewhere. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, daughter, and cats.
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