Happy Hour
Description
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.
Isa Epley, all of twenty-one years old, is already wise enough to understand that the purpose of life is the pursuit of pleasure. She arrives in New York with her newly blond best friend looking for adventure. They have little money, but that's hardly going to stop them.
By day, the girls sell clothes on a market stall, pinching pennies for their Bed-Stuy sublet and bodega lunches. By night, they weave between Brooklyn, the Upper East Side, and 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 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 having fun in a system that wants you to do neither.
Product Details
Earn by promoting books
Earn money by sharing your favorite books through our Affiliate program.
Become an affiliate
About the Author
Marlowe Granados is a writer and filmmaker. After spending time in London and New York, she now resides in Toronto.
Reviews
--Rachel Syme, New Yorker staff writer A dreamy account of one heady summer, Marlowe Granados's début 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
"Happy Hour is less a conventional coming-of-age story and more a flâneuse adventure ... [it's] unique for portraying young women having fun without looming threats of moral or mortal punishment."
--Esmé Hogeveen, GARAGE In Granados's amusingly mischievous debut, a young ingenue comes to New York City from London for a summer, seeking to bury her grief over her mother's death. By night, Isa Epley and her friend Gala Novak rub shoulders with celebrities and intellectuals. By day, they make ends meet selling clothes on consignment. This perfectly sums up a new age of innocence.
--Publishers Weekly, starred review "A wonderful, hilarious, pleasurably exhausting reminder of what it is to be young in a big city ... a swig of a very cold martini on a balmy evening."
--Megan Nolan "Amusingly mischievous ... a new age of innocence."
--Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) "Marlowe Granados writes with a delicious joy and confidence. She conveys frivolity without being frivolous, and describes the adventures and degradations of the lives of her characters with an intelligent distance and effervescence that is such a pleasure to read."
--Sheila Heti "Exquisitely captures so much of young, twenty-something life ... Granados has orchestrated a character and story so delicious that it makes me yearn just one night like theirs."
--Soraya Bouazzaoui, Aurelia Magazine "A champagne-soaked, strappy-heeled guide to a summer of indulgence ... Isa narrates with the wry, whip-smart bemusement of an F. Scott Fitzgerald character who woke up in 2013 with a martini and a vintage Gucci dress."
--GQ "Like the many cocktails sipped by our discerning narrator: effervescent, tart, and intoxicating."
--Kirkus (Starred Review)
