Happiness Forever — Adelaide Faith

A complete refreshment and uplift of energy: a hilarious, beguiling first novel for the head and the heart.

“It's maybe six hundred times a day,” Sylvie says, and then she stops and the therapist tilts her head. “That I think about you,” Sylvie goes on, the word you said so quietly as to be barely audible.

Sylvie is happy only when she is in therapy. This is because Sylvie is in love with her therapist; she thinks about her every second they're not together (roughly 167 hours and 10 minutes per week). In that room, Sylvie is able to talk about everything. Her true pleasures, which include hitting a piñata so the candy falls out, and her thoughts about the false hope promised by eighties music, and what a dog's inner life is really like. She's aware she has an obsession, but whether it's a case of extreme transference, “erotic transference,” or a lost person's need to connect, Sylvie isn't sure.

Beyond therapy, Sylvie has what she considers to be a small life: a job as a veterinary nurse, companionship from her tattooist friend via text, and her little brain-damaged dog, Curtains. One day, on the beach in her seaside town, she meets Chloe, who understands Sylvie completely. Chloe becomes her friend that day and for the rest of her life.

When the therapist delivers some devastating news, Sylvie has to imagine new and lasting ways of coping (that don't include being adopted by the therapist). Her world has begun to open up, inching beyond the pain, confusion, and fear that have confined her, and she must decide whether she's ready for a bravery of feeling.

With a lightness of touch, irresistible charm, and a rare, warm wit, Happiness Forever is one woman's search inside -- and for -- herself. In this stunning debut, Adelaide Faith encapsulates the great vulnerability, difficulty, and joy of being a person and of being alive.