Our Happy Days

A vivid tale of love and friendship, coincidence and fate, guilt and betrayal—and the memories of a summer that changed things forever.

Lenica, Marie, Fanny and Elsa spend their summers together on the Atlantic coast in France. The four of them are bound together, their friendship forged in sun-soaked days and wine-filled nights, giddy with happiness and youth.

Decades later, when three of the friends meet again, they realise that their bond has never been broken. Although older, they still carry with them everything that happened years ago—especially the summer that Lenica brought Sean along.

Our Happy Days is a novel about the most important things in life—and reminds us that we only remember the past as we want it to be.

Julia Holbe was born in 1969 and lives in Frankfurt am Main but spends part of the year in Brittany. She spent twenty years working as an editor of international literature at the publishing house S. Fischer Verlag. Our Happy Days is her first novel.

Imogen Taylor is a literary translator based in Berlin. Her translations include Fear and Twins by Dirk Kurbjuweit, Sascha Arango’s The Truth and Other Lies and Melanie Raabe’s The Trap, The Stranger and The Shadow.

‘Julia Holbe has written a beautiful, light and yet powerfully evocative book about a bygone happiness.’ Der Spiegel