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Hernan Diaz meets Ottessa Moshfegh in this madcap road trip chronicle; a moving display of human connection in the face of violence and climate destruction from a remarkable new voice in fiction.
Beatrice works at Twin Bridge, a chronically underfunded residential treatment center in near-future East Texas, teeming with enraged teenage girls on either too many or not enough drugs. On a normal day, it's difficult for Beatrice and the other staff—Arda, Carmen, and Linda—to keep their cool in dust-blown Askewn. But when a heat wave triggers a massive, sustained blackout, Beatrice and the other staff and residents must evacuate. Facing police brutality, sweltering heat, panicked evacuees, the girls' mounting withdrawal, and the consequences of her own lies, they search for a route out of the blackout zone. A catastrophe novel by turns tender and hilarious, fueled by a low-simmering political rage, Happy Bad is a rocket arrived on Earth.
"While the subject matter is as serious as can be, Nolan leavens the novel with gallows humor...The darkness of this excellent novel is amplified by how terrifyingly plausible it all is. A self-assured debut that is also a warning." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"This glimpse into a terrifyingly plausible future smuggles tenderness amid the horrors." —Publishers Weekly
"An exhilarating, dynamic, addictive debut, Delaney Nolan's Happy Bad is a hell of a book." —Jami Attenberg, author of A Reason to See You Again
"Delaney Nolan's breathtaking, sharply crafted debut announces the arrival of an important new writer. The characters who populate these pages are unforgettable. Happy Bad will stand the test of time, but it's also exactly the kind of book we need in our troubled times." —Jamel Brinkley, author of A Lucky Man and Witness
This information about Happy Bad 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.
Delaney Nolan received her MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was a Rona Jaffe fellow. She has since received a Pushcart Prize, two Academy of American Poets Prizes, and a Fulbright Fellowship in fiction; her fiction has appeared in Electric Literature, Guernica, Indiana Review, Oxford American, Tin House, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere, and has been adapted into a radio play and a short film. Her work has been chosen as a notable for Best American Essays and translated into Arabic, Bulgarian, Italian, and Polish. Based in New Orleans, she has also received recognition for her reporting in The Guardian, The Intercept, BBC, Al Jazeera, Mother Jones, and elsewhere.
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