Secrets of Happiness
by Joan Silber
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Pub Date 5 Aug 2021 | Archive Date 17 Aug 2021
Atlantic Books | Allen & Unwin
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Description
One of O: The Oprah Magazine's O Mag's Most Anticipated Books of 2021
One of Publishers Weekly's Top 10 picks for Spring 2021
Ethan, a young lawyer in New York, learns that his father has long kept a second family - a wife and two kids living in Queens. In the aftermath of this revelation, Ethan's mother spends a year travelling abroad, returning much changed, just as her now ex-husband falls ill. Across town, Ethan's half brothers are caught in their own complicated journeys: one brother's penchant for minor delinquency has escalated and the other must travel to Bangkok to bail him out, while the bargains their mother struck about love and money continue to shape all their lives.
As Ethan finds himself caught in a love triangle of his own, the interwoven fates of these two households elegantly unfurl to touch many other figures, revealing secret currents of empathy and loyalty, the bounty of improvised families and the paradoxical ties that weave through life's rich contours. With a generous and humane spirit, Secrets of Happiness elucidates the ways people marshal the resources at hand in an effort to find joy.
Advance Praise
'Secrets of Happiness unfolds across families and lovers, across time and expectations, across the country and across the world, and the bigger it gets, the more it shows how deeply connected we are. Joan Silber writes with a frankness and freshness that draws the reader closer with every page. It would be impossible to overstate just how good this book is.' - Ann Patchett
'Secrets of Happiness is a swim in cool, clear water in which the contours and colours of all experience are magnified, purified, intensified. Joan Silber's translucent, morally attentive prose does something to the vision as well as the spirit: if you can look up from it, you'll find your own world altered - rinsed clean, and luminous.' - Charlotte Wood, author of THE WEEKEND
'This mesmerizing story of love, lies, and the consequences of betrayal brims with heart and intelligence.' - Publishers Weekly
'The author of the award-winning Improvement once again takes her scalpel to the complex anatomy of family, dissecting, with stunning precision, one young New Yorker's struggles with his father's secret life, the toll of deceits that doom a marriage, and the pitfalls of his own sexuality.' - O, The Oprah Magazine
'A new novel in stories from the master of the form...E]choes the great Grace Paley, to whom Silber is so close in spirit and voice. While Paley was an all-New York gal, Silber makes faraway places seem familiar - oh, for the time when we can work on knowing the world even one-tenth as well as she does. These secrets of happiness really will make you happy, at least for a few sweet hours.' - Kirkus Reviews
'Improvement is a major work of literature.' - Nick Hornby, on IMPROVEMENT, The Believer
Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9781911630081 |
| PRICE | £14.99 (GBP) |
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
Susan O, Reviewer
Rather like Improvement, Joan Silber’s previous novel which explored the fallout of an accident through all that were affected by it, Secrets of Happiness looks at our yearning for happiness through the revelation of the second family of an apparently happily married man.
Ethan and Allyson took their parents’ happiness for granted until the arrival of legal demands for the maintenance of Gil’s two teenage sons, tucked away with their Thai mother in Queens. From this revelation radiates out a series of connections, some close, others tangential. The results reads like an intricately connected set of short stories; if you look closely at that jacket you'll notice it's a jigsaw which neatly sums up Silber's structure. Beginning and ending with Ethan’s narrative revealing his father’s secret life and his own discovery of quiet happiness in his forties, each character's story is narrated in their own voice, often overlapping with others in surprising ways. Silber’s characters are astutely portrayed, the baton passed from one to the other smoothly, and a pleasing thread of gentle humour runs through the novel. It ends on a satisfying, characteristically understated note.
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