Happiness and Love, Zoe Dubno
Happiness and Love, Zoe Dubno
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

Happiness and Love

Author: Zoe Dubno

Narrator: Zoe Dubno

Unabridged: 6 hr 7 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/02/2025


Synopsis

One of Vogue’s Best Books of the Year

“Reading the novel is akin to spending time with a witty if merciless observer of other people’s idiocies. There’s something of a latter-day Holden Caulfield about the narrator…it possesses an enlivening, claustrophobic charge.” —The Spectator

Following a young woman over the course of one outrageous and insufferable downtown dinner party at the home of her estranged best friends—an artist and curator couple, whom she now realizes stands for everything she detests—Happiness and Love is a “deliciously scathing” (Vogue UK) debut novel about brazen materialism, self-obsession, and the empty careerism of so-called cultural elites.

From her perch on the corner of a white sofa, in the beautiful apartment of terrible people, our narrator watches the assembled group of artists, writers, and hangers-on and silently, mercilessly eviscerates them in a “nervy and blisteringly funny” (The Wall Street Journal) monologue.

“Told in a single long, savage and hilarious paragraph,” this is a novel that can be read “in one delicious go” (Financial Times): the story of an evening that slowly self-destructs, as the guests sip orange wine and await the arrival of a newly famous actress. When the guest of honor finally does arrive, she sets in motion a disastrous end to the evening, laying bare the depravity and decadence of the hosts’ empty little lives—a hollowness that the narrator herself knows all too well.

About Zoe Dubno

Zoe Dubno is a writer from New York. She attended Oberlin College and has an MFA from Rutgers University, Newark. Her writing has appeared in GrantaThe New York Times MagazineThe New York Review of BooksThe GuardianThe NationVogue, and elsewhere. Happiness and Love is her first novel.


Reviews

Goodreads review by emma on September 23, 2025

my two favorite things to read about (review to come / thanks to the publisher for the arc)......more

Goodreads review by Ceecee on June 18, 2025

3.5 rounded up The narrator, who is a writer, is finally back in New York, a city she has spent several years avoiding as well as the former friends that inhabit it. She has no plans to see anyone but one morning while pacing up and down the Bowery and surrounding streets, she bumps into Eugene. She......more

Goodreads review by Paul on October 05, 2025

The opening lines of Zoe Dubno's brilliant debut novel Happiness and Love immediately grabbed me: 'While everyone was waiting for the actress to arrive from her premiere, I sat in the corner seat of the white linen sofa at Eugene's with my legs crossed, watching the rest of the party and regretting m......more

Goodreads review by Zoe on February 19, 2025

my goodreads policy is to give every book 5 stars so i had to... give my own book 5 stars 🐒......more

Goodreads review by Sunny on September 13, 2025

The psychological horror of the nyc art world......more