This Happy, Niamh Campbell
This Happy, Niamh Campbell
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This Happy
Shortlisted for the An Post Irish Book Awards 2020

Author: Niamh Campbell

Narrator: Diedre O’Connell

Unabridged: 8 hr 23 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/11/2020

Synopsis

'A beautiful, wry love story' David Nicholls, author of ONE DAY

'I love this woman's writing. Golden sentences' Diana Evans, author of ORDINARY PEOPLE

I have taken apart every panel of this, like an ornamental fan. But we stayed in the cottage for three weeks only, just three weeks, because it was cut short you see - cut short after just three weeks, when I'd left my entire life behind.

When Alannah was twenty-three, she met a man who was older than her - a married man - and fell in love. Things happened suddenly. They met in April, in the first bit of mild weather; and in August, they went to stay in rural Ireland, overseen by the cottage's landlady.

Six years later, when Alannah is newly married to another man, she sees the landlady from afar. Memories of those days spent in bliss, then torture, return to her. And the realisation that she has been waiting - all this time - to be rediscovered.

About Niamh Campbell

Niamh Campbell is the author of This Happy (2020) and We Were Young (2022). She has won the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Katarína on April 20, 2020

I have seen This Happy mentioned in a magazine and intrigued by the title and the cover, I have decided to read it soon after. Unfortunately, I didn't enjoy it very much. While reading it, but even more after, I still cannot understand the main idea behind this book. I understood the main plot of a w......more

Goodreads review by Bookthesp1 on June 21, 2020

This is a tricksy book. The end covers have an author photo that is so posed I wondered if she was being arch and ironic. The front cover has a striking painting of a girl a little like the author but it’s not her. This is yet another debut novel by a female Irish writer. After Anna Burns. Sally Roo......more

Goodreads review by Charlotte on July 19, 2020

Usually I love book about “nothing”, those books that really dive into relationships... but this was not for me. It felt like it was trying to be too arty, and so I couldn’t get properly absorbed into the story. I really enjoyed the first 150 pages or so, but it was downhill after that :(......more

Goodreads review by Lyn on October 17, 2020

I pushed through and finished this to see if it went anywhere, and sadly it didn’t. The narrator is self indulgent and shallow. Her motives for doing things, like marrying,seem artificial. I just wanted to slap her. This genre is not for me.......more

Quotes

A beautiful, wry love story

I love this woman's writing. Golden sentences

One of the year's most beautifully written books, THIS HAPPY traces the path to womanhood of Alannah from disastrous affair to no-less-comfortable marriage and beyond The i, Best Books of 2020 So Far

If you loved Sally Rooney's NORMAL PEOPLE, read this novel ... Darkly romantic ... The moral ambiguities (and irreconcilable power struggles) inherent in the relationship are familiar territory for fans of CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS, but in many ways, the prose is less reminiscent of Rooney's clipped, email-honed style than of Eimear McBride's lyrical Joycean sentences Vogue

I tore through This Happy over the course of one sticky day. The story of a woman reflecting on the claustrophobic end of a past affair, it's sharp and bracing, with language almost balletic in its intensity.

Superb... This is a novel of psychological texture... Campbell can turn a sensory phrase... its opulent unhappiness is something to enjoy The Sunday Telegraph

She has already been compared with writers such as Eimear McBride, Ali Smith and Claire Louise Bennett, and indeed Niamh Campbell's debut novel does add a distinctive new voice to Irish literature... Witty, fiery, wistful and even shocking, with engrossing heady prose, Campbell's style is unique Irish Independent

The quality of the writing is top-notch. Page after page of astute, deft observations ... Campbell holds her own against her contemporaries, writers like Claire-Louise Bennett, Sally Rooney, Nicole Flattery, who have set a high bar at home and abroad for fast-paced, truth-laced fiction ... THIS HAPPY is a layered and vibrant debut ... full of sensual, offbeat descriptions Irish Times

A triumph of style... This book is made of ancient stuff. It is of the land and the landscape - replete with unashamedly ornate, arguably extraneous detail... She writes against the style du jour - sparse prose; tight, fast plots - in favour of something more rich and rebellious ... I heard tones of Joyce as I read - not only in the direct references ("the snot-green sea", Alannah's remark: 'he was my epiphany') - but also in the muscular, myth-laden prose... It is the best novel I have read all year. It snuck up on me like a ghost in the night. It spoke on a different frequency Sunday Business Post

The story of this relationship is interweaved with the present so closely that it feels almost overlaid, reading convincingly like a memory ... An exhilarating story The Sunday Times

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