The Happy Couple
A Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
“Daring . . . a brilliant contemporary novel.”—Colm Tóibín
An intimate, sharply funny novel about a couple heading toward their wedding, and the three friends who may draw them apart
Meet Celine and Luke. For all intents and purposes, the happy couple.
Luke (a serial cheater) and Celine (more interested in piano than domestic life) plan to marry in a year.
Archie (the best man) should be moving on from his love for Luke and up the corporate ladder, but he finds himself utterly stuck.
Phoebe (the bridesmaid and Celine’s sister) just wants to get to the bottom of Luke’s frequent unexplained disappearances.
And Vivian (a wedding guest) is the only one with any emotional distance and observes her friends like ants in a colony.
As the wedding approaches and their five lives intersect, these characters will each look for a path to the happily ever after—but does it lie at the end of an aisle?
In her wry, sprightly, and unmistakable voice, Naoise Dolan makes the marriage plot entirely her own in a sparkling ensemble novel that is both ferociously clever and supremely enjoyable.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Irish author Dolan (Exciting Times) offers a sardonic chronicle of the year leading up to the wedding of a seemingly ill-suited Dublin couple in their late 20s. Celine is a pianist more dedicated to her career than her relationship with Luke, a slacker at a tech firm who juggles a series of romantic entanglements behind her back. The novel moves from an engagement party in London, which Luke inexplicably flees before the night is over, through the fraught days leading up to the wedding, alternating between Celine's and Luke's points of view along with those of Celine's disturbed younger sister and bridesmaid, Phoebe; Luke's best man and former lover, Archie, who might have had something to do with Luke's disappearance from the party; and the withering Vivian, who views her friends as ants in an anthill: "She could move among them. But she didn't have to, and often enough she didn't want to." Vivian and her arch sense of humor often stand in for Dolan, who extracts amusement from her characters and plays narrative games, such as spinning through version after version of Luke's planned wedding speech. The will-they-or-won't-they question is enough to sustain the novel's momentum as the self-destructive characters careen toward disaster. This is hard to look away from.
