I HOPE YOU'RE HAPPY

Exceptional short stories featuring young millennial women, blending dark fantasy and quasi-horror with humour and intellectual dash

Announcing the arrival of a major talent, I HOPE YOU'RE HAPPY is more a warning than a wish.

Photos of women eating go viral, a cookie communicates a threat, and women working dead-end jobs become entangled in the performances around them. Everyday experiences of friendship, family, dating and desire catapult the reader into a creepy vortex of horror. Characters reveal themselves in slippery glimpses, through positive affirmations, social media accounts and secret appetites.

With this collection of haunting and haunted stories, Marni Appleton immerses us in a world of fleeting encounters, empty couplings, break ups, bust ups, threesomes and ghosts, giving us a kaleidoscopic overview of twenty-first century life.

'These beautifully written, female-focused stories stayed with me long past closing the cover. Sensual, alive and haunting. Dark wisps of womanhood.' Lucy Prebble, Executive Producer and writer on the Bafta, Golden Globe and Emmy award-winning HBO dramaSuccession

'This collection of wry and incisive stories explores navigating the sticky, glorious and more-often-than-not absolutely horrific terrain of late girlhood and early womanhood.' Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi, author ofThe Centre

'Truthful, dark, and walking the line between delicious and disturbing,I HOPE YOU'RE HAPPYis a rich and haunting read. Savour or gorge, this is a very special collection of deceptively cutting stories.' Lottie Hazell, author ofPiglet

'Smart, surprising, and witty, these stories are a joy to read.' Naomi Booth, author ofAnimals at Night

'These tense stories of the zeitgeist show how the conditions of late capitalism promise women freedom while keeping them trapped in their economic and social circumstances. Clever, convincing and wry, they bowled me over. Like Mary Gaitskill and Miranda July before her, Marni Appleton writes about how it is to live now.' Julia Bell, author ofHymnalandRadical Attention

'Marni Appleton writes with insight, honesty and inventiveness into the raw, brutal spaces of girlhood and early womanhood. A powerful, political collection that maps intimately the minds and bodies of its characters, these stories stayed with me long after I'd finished.' Fran Littlewood, author ofAmazing Grace Adams

'Such a wonderful collection, the writing so sharp, witty, dark, carefully observed and full of the realities of present day life.' Gerard Woodward, author ofLegolandandI'll Go to Bed...read more...