Join us for an evening with Amber Sparks, who will read from her debut novel, Happy People Don’t Live Here. A conversation with Anna Beecher will follow. This in-person event will be free and open to the public. We recommend arriving early for the best seating.
About the Book: In this darkly funny gothic tale, a reclusive mother and her saturnine daughter move into a haunted building brimming with eccentrics—and secrets.
Just past the edge of summer, Alice and her daughter, Fern, arrive at the Pine Lake Apartments—a former sanatorium occupied by an ensemble of peculiar neighbors and a smattering of ghosts. Among the living: the Mermaid Lady, who performs in a nightclub fish tank; the building’s handyperson, moonlighting as a medium; and an awkwardly charming professor of medieval studies. Fern alone is acquainted with the undead, who pass like troubled clouds through the apartments, humanity mostly lost ages ago. For the determinedly private Alice, Pine Lake seems the perfect place at the edge of the world to hide herself and her daughter—until the day Fern finds a dead body in the dumpster.
Intent on solving the mystery of this discarded corpse, Fern eagerly puts her encyclopedic knowledge of detective novels to good use while dodging warnings from her increasingly paranoid mother. She soon comes to realize that within the strange tapestry of Pine Lake residents, nothing is ever quite as it seems. Her investigation digs up long-buried secrets, including her mother’s, that implicate each of her neighbors…and conjures a new one from beyond the grave.
The hotly anticipated debut novel from “master of the fantastic” (Roxane Gay) Amber Sparks, Happy People Don’t Live Here is an unforgettable portrait of family—whether by birth or by chance or by choice—and the sometimes dangerous myths we make to keep ours together.
About the Author: Amber Sparks is the author of three collections of short fiction, including And I Do Not Forgive You and The Unfinished World. Her essays, film criticism, and book criticism have appeared widely, in Bright Wall/Dark Room, The Paris Review, Slate, Tin House, Granta, and The Cut, among others. She lives in Washington, DC, with her husband, daughter, and two cats.
About the Moderator: Anna Beecher is the author of the novel Here Comes the Miracle, which was shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, and the memoir We All Come Home Alive. Anna’s theater work has been presented by venues including Lincoln Center, Young Vic, Southbank Center, and Barbican London. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Virginia.
Happy People Don’t Live Here will be released on October 14. To order the book, please see below for the New Dominion Bookshop book order form or call the shop at 434-295-2552.
"Amber Sparks is one of my favorite living writers, and Happy People Don’t Live Here is just as searing, funny, and unforgettable as I hoped. In the world of Amber Sparks, ten-year-old girls are extraordinary and ghosts are regular as rain. This is an enthralling novel about how mothers haunt their daughters and vice versa, and the beautiful fact of love after death. Alice and Fern feel like they have always existed and always will. Get ready for your new favorite novel."
—Marie-Helene Bertino
New Dominion Bookshop Book Order Form
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