Happy People Don't Live Here: A Novel [Hardcover]

Just past the edge of summer, Alice and her daughter, Fern, arrive at the Pine Lake Apartmentsa 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 buildings 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 daughteruntil the day Fern finds a dead body in the dumpster.In this darkly funny gothic tale, a reclusive mother and her saturnine daughter move into a haunted building brimming with eccentricsand secrets. Equal parts ghost story, mystery, and family dramaa little Amber Sparks' long-awaited debut novel is almost here: 'a story about secrets, and buried trauma and little goth children.... In my writing, theres a ghost in everything, because IRL there is a ghost in everything, Sparks adds. Even if the ghost is just me, haunting myself and my fiction forever. The long-awaited debut novel from Sparks looks like a delightfully autumnal read, about a mother and daughter who move into an apartment building that used to be a sanatorium and the weird people (living and dead) who they encounter there. Everything about it reminds me of Ray Bradbury and Annie Hartnett and I already know Im going to want to stay in the Pine Lake Apartments forever (and maybe I will???). As a longtime fan of Sparks, when her debut landed on my desk, I stopped everything I was doing to read the first few chapters, where an unforgettable cast of characters call a peculiar apartment complex home. If you love Sparks works within a highly stylized mix of quirky and eeriebut from within her own idiosyncratic vision, she celebrates the power and strangeness of weird women and girllӷ