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Happy Hour: A Novel Paperback – September 7, 2021

3.8 3.8 out of 5 stars 699 ratings

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With the verve and bite of Ottessa Moshfegh and the barbed charm of Nancy Mitford, this stunning debut about a young ingénue in the big city is “as refreshing as gin fizz . . . a wild careening joyride through a hot sultry summer in New York” (Rachel Syme, The New Yorker).

Isa Epley, all of twenty-one years old, is already wise enough to understand that the purpose of life is the pursuit of pleasure. She arrives in New York with her newly blond best friend looking for adventure. They have little money, but that’s hardly going to stop them.
 
By day, the girls sell clothes on a market stall, pinching pennies for their Bed-Stuy sublet and bodega lunches. By night, they weave between Brooklyn, the Upper East Side, and the Hamptons among a rotating cast of celebrities, artists, Internet entrepreneurs, stuffy intellectuals, and bad-mannered grifters. Resources run ever tighter and the strain tests their friendship as they try to convert social capital into something more lasting than precarious gigs as au pairs, nightclub hostesses, paid audience members, and aspiring foot fetish models.
 
Through it all, Isa’s bold, beguiling voice captures the precise thrill of cultivating a life of glamour and intrigue as she juggles paying her dues with skipping out on the bill.
Happy Hour is a novel about getting by and having fun in a system that wants you to do neither.
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Marlowe Granados's Happy Hour is as refreshing as a gin fizz. It is a wild careening joyride through a hot sultry summer in New York in 2013, and it evokes that time with such sparkling specificity that you can feel the heat coming off the pavement. If you are looking for romance, ambition, glamour, and a story about what it means to be young and striving in the city, this is your song of the summer."
—Rachel Syme, New Yorker staff writer

"A dreamy account of one heady summer, Marlowe Granados's début is a dispatch from another land; not only New York City, but youth itself.
Happy Hour is aptly titled - it's an intoxicating book, at once heartbreaking and joyful."
—Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind, Rich and Pretty, and That Kind of Mother

"
Happy Hour is filled with charm, memorable insight, and witty aperçus, adding up to the realization that life, while unfair, is antic enough to be worth all the trouble."
—A. S. Hamrah, author of The Earth Dies Streaming

"[
Happy Hour is] about being young, grabbing life by the tail and enjoying it to the full...Its tone reminds me of early Edna O'Brien, with its worldly outlook, its wit - and its obvious smarts."
—Deborah Dundas, Toronto Star

"
Happy Hour feels like a secret casually revealed in a hotel lobby bathroom as you fix your lipstick and a breathless whisper at six in the morning when it's too hot to sleep. Marlowe Granados writes sparkling prose with tenderness and unexpected depth. Happy Hour is a spellbinding début."
—Amy Jones, author of We're All in This Together and Every Little Piece of Me

"
Happy Hour is less a conventional coming-of-age story and more a flâneuse adventure...[it's] unique for portraying young women having fun without looming threats of moral or mortal punishment."
—Esmé Hogeveen, GARAGE

"A wonderful, hilarious, pleasurably exhausting reminder of what it is to be young in a big city...a swig of a very cold martini on a balmy evening."
Megan Nolan

"Amusingly mischievous...a new age of innocence."
Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

"Marlowe Granados writes with a delicious joy and confidence. She conveys frivolity without being frivolous, and describes the adventures and degradations of the lives of her characters with an intelligent distance and effervescence that is such a pleasure to read."
—Sheila Heti

"Exquisitely captures so much of young, twenty-something life ... Granados has orchestrated a character and story so delicious that it makes me yearn just one night like theirs. It is expertly and intentionally pretentious in a way that only some of the best writers can succeed in pulling off."
—Soraya Bouazzaoui, Aurelia Magazine

"A champagne-soaked, strappy-heeled guide to a summer of indulgence ... Isa narrates with the wry, whip-smart bemusement of an F. Scott Fitzgerald character who woke up in 2013 with a martini and a vintage Gucci dress."
GQ

"Like the many cocktails sipped by our discerning narrator: effervescent, tart, and intoxicating."
Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

"[A] sharp and beguiling debut ... Granados's nuanced characterization, biting observational humor and intoxicating prose make
Happy Hour a delicacy to be savored, as well as a poised takedown of New York's cultural elite."
—Devon Ashby, Shelf Awareness

"Granados manages to capture an airy and effortless tone and her prose sparkes with dry wit on every page."
—Emma Davey, BUST

"
Happy Hour is a picaresque for the glamorous and broke."
—Sangeeta Singh-Kurtz, Vulture

"A tale of the sticky, sweet heat of summer in New York City and girls living their best, champagne-soaked lives ... joyously sultry, a celebration of decadent abandon in the face of distrustful men, precarious finances and unknown career paths"
—Caitlin Quinlan, AnOther

"The strength of
Happy Hour is Granados' wit and the assuredness with which she delivers on-the-nose observations and youthful wisdom."
—Kate Mabus, USA Today

"This is
Breakfast At Tiffany's meets Girls and it's going to be your new book obsession."
—Sarra Manning, Red

"Brief and flighty ... Granados paints New York with all of the silky glamour it deserves"
—Han Clark, Lunate

"Confident, charismatic and alive to the pleasure of observation, the voice Granados conjures in
Happy Hour is a testament to the power of charm on the page."
—Molly Fischer, New York Times

"A glitzy coming-of-age saga about two friends navigating the singular experience of getting by in New York City."
—Juliana Ukiomogbe, Interview Magazine

"Reading
Happy Hour feels like eating a shimmering, intoxicating slice of the best summer of your life, a sort of Proustian cookie that transports you back not to your childhood but to the time when you looked best in cut-off shorts and felt like your heart was made of rubber."
—Alexandra Kleeman, Electric Literature

"Fun, decadent ... a picaresque exploration of female friendship staged across a series of tableaus set in New York City during one particularly sweltering summer in the early 2010s."
—Sophie Kemp, The Nation

"Reading this book is like watching a video from the party last night and wishing you'd been there."
—Mariah Kreutter, Soft Punk

"Marlowe Granados' debut novel is glamorous, insightful, and most importantly, anti-work."
—Sophia June, NYLON

"A fresh take on the party girl genre."
—Samantha Leach, Bustle

"[
Happy Hour] combines fun and glamour with Granados's sharp sense of how moneyed society really works."
—Alex Quicho, Bookforum

"Granados does a masterful job at touching on race and class without hitting the reader over the head with overused tropes or stale language."
—Ama Kwarteng, Coveteur

"
Happy Hour is richly written, vividly rendering a stinking city, its tangled social circles and the airy pretence of an exclusive party crowd ... it is refreshing to read a book about fun and frivolity whose climax does not rely on the moralisation of peril."
—Sarah Carson, inews

"If your days of living for perpetual glamour are now behind you (or yet to come), this magnificent debut is an excellent reminder of what it costs and how it's done."
—Ed Needham, Strong Words

"Effervescent ... Isa's combination of naïveté, intelligence, and panache beguiles."
New Yorker

"
Happy Hour is the perfect tonic ... a sharp, original and intelligent take on existence’s larger themes: work, death, the meaning of life and the very structures which control it."
—Monica MacSwan, Bad Form

"Granados's party-girl protagonist Isa Epley talks like [Eve] Babitz and navigates the New York scene like one of Edith Wharton's heroines ... With finger-licking delight, she reveals the hollowness at the center of the matryoshka doll that is the city’s social networking apparatus."
—Jamie Hood, Los Angeles Review of Books

"
Happy Hour refuses to separate the frivolous and the adventurous ... as refreshing as the first sip of a martini on a searing summer’s night."
—Eloise Hendy, Elephant

"Effervescent ... a confection of cocktails, rooftop flirtations, bright dresses, and the joys and melancholy of Female Friendship."
—Keziah Weir, Vanity Fair ("8 Books We Couldn’t Put Down This Month")

"Profound ... At their core, books are about the beautiful, but here we have a book where our narrator is not only an observer of beauty but in possession of that beauty too."
—Ellen O'Donohue Oddy, Radical Art Review

"A delight to read and to hear. Every word evokes a sensation from our lives that lingers with the turn of the page."
—Amanda Luna Ballerini, Flash Art

"Daring and roguish"
—Alex Quicho, White Review

"Funny, profound and beautiful. Granados is brilliant on the intersections of social class, race, work, money, beauty and power."
—Jessica Andrews, Sheerluxe

"A sweet cocktail, a delight in diary format"
—Ella Creamer, Guardian

“A breezy, fun book for a breezy, fun summer …
Happy Hour will make you want to cultivate a life of glamour and cocktails”
—Sophie Dickinson, Telegraph

About the Author

Marlowe Granados is a writer and filmmaker. After spending time in London and New York, she now resides in Toronto.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Verso Fiction (September 7, 2021)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1839764015
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1839764011
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.6 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.04 x 0.79 x 7.74 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    3.8 3.8 out of 5 stars 699 ratings

About the author

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Marlowe Granados
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Marlowe Granados is a writer and filmmaker based in Toronto. She co-hosts The Mean Reds, a podcast dedicated to women-led films. Her debut novel Happy Hour is now available in Canada. It will be published in the US & UK September 7, 2021, by Verso Books.

Customer reviews

3.8 out of 5 stars
699 global ratings

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Happy Hour byMarlow Granados3 starsThis book was not exactly what I expected. I expected more of a story with all the usual rising action, climax, resolution. Instead, it was a collection of experiences that Isa and Gala go through during their time in NY. There are also flashbacks from Isa’s time in London and other countries. She’s been traveling the world since she was 18yrs old, now 21. Many of these experiences are similar, they go out, they meet various artists or people from academia, they try to better themselves with whatever they are able to get from these people. There were some lines that were quotable front he book like, “When you are smarter than you look, you have the advantage”What saved me from giving up on this book was it was also a selection on Libro.fm and the narration done by, Bronwyn Szabo, was excellent. It brought more energy to the story for me. This was the roughest ARC I've ever read in regards to edits needed. There were many words per page that had left letters out. I felt like I was trying to interpret someone who had texted the story with many letters left out or that I was a student doing a cloze exercise.A line from the book really summed up my feelings. One of the many men they met along the way said of Isa’s storytelling style “ when you start a story you don’t know how it’s going to end up.” That is kind of how I felt through the whole book. Where is this going? This one just didn’t do it for me. Thank you to Netgalley and Verso books for the digital ARC and Libro.fm for the audiobook version.
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Top reviews from the United States

  • Reviewed in the United States on August 22, 2023
    An incredible reflection on young womanhood, which proves more challenging and whimsical each and every day. A familiar story that is as poignant as it is fun.
    One person found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on September 11, 2021
    “I do wonder whether my memories should stay only mine, or have they ever been?”

    This book was delightful and refreshing and not really at all what I expected. Isa and her best friend, Gala, are spending their summer in NYC. They sell clothes in a market stall by day to make barely enough to pay the rent for their room and feed themselves bodega meals and happy hour cocktails. I expected heavy plot-driving youthful drama a la Gossip Girl meets the financial insecurity of inconsistent work. Instead, the events that happen merely become content for Isa’s journaling, providing sincere reflection and commentary that is not unlike Esther Greenwood from The Bell Jar (but a more light-hearted version).

    This novel shines because of Isa’s insight. She’s got the gift of youth and a keen eye for detail, which makes the instability of the summer that much more fun to read. This book reminded me how quickly we can lose the go-with-the-flow attitude in our adult lives, and it was interesting how often I found myself worrying about Isa and Gala and how they were going to get by. NYC is a lovely backdrop with its assortment of company, specialty cocktails, delectable eats, and intriguing conversations. It’s one of those books that feels like it has a hidden, overarching story, which was my favorite part.

    I’d recommend especially for fans of The Bell Jar and Sweetbitter!
    2 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on February 17, 2022
    Quick read and gave away
    2 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on August 31, 2023
    for the moshfeghie girlies, this one’s for you
    One person found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on January 19, 2022
    Happy Hour zooms along following the summer adventures of Isa and Gala in NYC. Diary-style with no real plot— still the characters and the ongoing quest for money and the next party are fascinating. I found myself picturing this story as a graphic novel several times. The middle of the “story” falls flat (money woes and night life wear thin, so many characters it is hard to keep them all straight without paging back to figure out who is who) but picks up again withthe invitation to the Hamptons and at long last revealing Isa’s backstory. Throughout there are beautiful observations, and superb passages of clarity. Now what I’d really like to read is Granados (fictional) diary of her life in London at age 18!
    2 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on October 3, 2024
    A short (should've been quick) read with a few good quotes. The characters were a bit confusing at times but I enjoyed it overall. 3.5 stars.
  • Reviewed in the United States on May 11, 2023
    my sister liked it
  • Reviewed in the United States on December 8, 2022
    Admittedly I am NOT the demographic for this book, but I have vivid memories of my twenties which included adventures, excesses, multiple locations, and inappropriate relationships. But I hope that they also included people far less vacuous and self-obsessed than the ones in the book. I found NOTHING redeemable in a protagonist who admits pride in doing nothing with one's life. Perhaps there will be a sequel in which Isa grows up into a person who contributes something....anything to humanity but I'm not holding out any hope. And there are far better-written books about decadent NY--Bright Lights, Big City comes to mind. Don't bother with this one.
    4 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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  • Niamh
    2.0 out of 5 stars likeable but no real story
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 15, 2024
    Characters or story didn’t go anywhere

    Interesting descriptions and there was many times where the scenes were vivid but unsure as to what was the point behind it all
  • Pol
    4.0 out of 5 stars Buen libro de lectura fácil y entretenida
    Reviewed in Spain on January 13, 2024
    La novela tiene lugar en el verano de 2013 en Nueva York, donde Isa y Gala, debido a problemas de documentación, realizan diversos trabajos para sobrevivir. A pesar de la presión económica, la historia inicialmente carece de estrés.

    El estilo de escritura es animado, con Isa compartiendo juicios ingeniosos sobre su entorno. Aunque limitadas financieramente, Isa y Gala encuentran formas creativas de vivir a su manera, como ser parte de una audiencia de estudio.

    La narrativa refleja la seguridad de Isa y su capacidad para disfrutar la vida con pequeños toques de glamour, incluso con ingresos modestos.
  • Hana
    4.0 out of 5 stars great
    Reviewed in Germany on July 18, 2023
    loved it
  • JPM
    1.0 out of 5 stars What a waste
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 25, 2021
    This was recommended to me by a magazine. As a former NYer living in England I thought it would be a captivating story. It was just 2 girls and their nights out and money troubles. No story line or plot. Just drinks here or there and one night stand tales. Couldn’t wait to finish it and will leave it in my hotel for some other idiot to read. Mercy on them.