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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. He's in his mid-thirties; she's 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 Chuck's luxury flat―a world away from Joey's 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's I Want You to Be Happy is a sharp-eyed tale of two people searching for meaning and connection in modern times, missing the mark maybe, but still trying.
"Though his prose can be 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 Reviews
"[A] dreary but all-too-real look into the will to persist amid dim hopes for a career and love." —Publishers Weekly
This information about I Want You to Be Happy 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.
Jem Calder was born in Cambridge and lives and works in London. His fiction has been published in The Stinging Fly and Granta. He is the author of the short-story collection Reward System.
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