On New Year’s Eve, a pair of addicts robs a string of high-end parties in order to fund their own recovery. A middle-aged husband, bewildered by his failing marriage, redirects his anxiety toward a routine colonoscopy. A Russian hitman suffering from a mysterious lung ailment retrieves long-buried memories of his past. In the nineteenth century, a disparate group of women coalesce in the attempt to aid a young girl in her escape from a hospital for the insane. In these eight stories about disparate characters grappling with conflicts ranging from mundane to extraordinary, Caroline Adderson’s A Way to Be Happy considers what it means to find happiness—and how we so often seem to understand it through our encounters with the lives, and the stories, of others.
Buy A Way to Be Happy:
- Longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize
- Chosen as the Best-Written October Release by The Auraist
- A CBC Fall Reading List Selection, 2024
Advance praise for A Way to Be Happy:
“A superb and unique collection. Intricate, compassionate, complex, its every sentence carefully built, tested, and polished, each story draws the reader into the life of a character hurtling or meandering towards the consequences of their own choices and to the story’s necessary conclusion. They will by turn flood you with unexpected sympathy, lighten your mood, or leave you with a puzzle you can’t quite solve. No one else writes short fiction the way Caroline Adderson does, and there are only eight stories in the book. The way to be happiest is to savour each one.”
—Kathy Page, Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize-winning author of Dear Evelyn
“Caroline Adderson’s voice is as vivid as ever in this exciting new collection, and her characters are unfailingly mesmerizing—distinctive, unpredictable, somehow like everyone yet no one you’ve ever met before.”
—Lynn Coady, author of Watching You Without Me
“Caroline Adderson builds terrific suspense from her characters’ lonely, off-centre lives. Each story in A Way to Be Happy is its own mysterious world, shaped by her outstanding powers of imagination and sympathy.”
—Elizabeth Hay, author of Snow Road Station
“Caroline Adderson is one of Canada’s best short story writers. A brilliant stylist, her inventive sentences are the trademark of a literary pro.”
—Susan Swan, author of the upcoming memoir Big Girls Don’t Cry
Praise for A Way to Be Happy
“Stories by an accomplished Canadian writer about the complexity of loneliness and the sweet relief of connection… Adderson, best known in the U.S. for her children’s books, is a deft, masterful storyteller whose literary fiction surely deserves more attention.”
“Caroline Adderson’s stories are delicious: they zip and bubble, observe, and a number are touched with tenderness… Character, plot, voice, words—Adderson has command of all elements of a story. She should be read.”
—The New York Journal of Books
“Combined with tight, poignant descriptions—“the Braille of acne” on a fidgety man’s neck, the mother who “specialized in withholding desperately sought information,” the landscaper whose “bratwurst thumbs were barely opposable”—such moments convey the inner turmoil, emotional loneliness, and absorbing humanity that animate A Way to Be Happy as a whole.”
—The Literary Review of Canada
“Though her writing is incisive, emotionally astute, slyly funny and award-winning, it still feels like Adderson hasn’t quite gotten her due as one of this country’s best short-story writers. The first story in this Giller-longlisted collection, about a couple who awkwardly try to burgle a Christmas party while posing as guests, sets the tone for the tales to come.”
—Fall Book Preview, The Globe and Mail
“The author, who has written five novels, two previous books of short stories and twenty kids books, is interested in how people survive worry and uncertainty. The way things go sideways sometimes and stay that way. These are characters who are seeking a resting place or possibly an escape route… You finish reading these alternately touching and funny stories grateful that the characters have met someone (a partner, a neighbour, a stranger) who they can rely on and that all is not lost. Or is it?”
“The Canadian novelist Caroline Adderson’s latest collection of short stories A Way to Be Happy is immensely refreshing, as it not only explores the uniqueness but also showcases the unpredictability of the everyday in a manner only a few writers manage to do. For this collection, she has rightly earned a place in the longlist of this year’s Giller Prize.”
“What makes this collection especially compelling is the breathing space between each story, where there are more questions than answers. Each protagonist is unique, the voice of each story changes, and not all the endings offer complete resolution. Rather, A Way to be Happy offers a wide range of perspectives, placing the protagonists in a varied rhythm of mundane and extreme situations and presenting a refreshing mosaic of the human experience… When seeking happiness, there is always a cost. The journey is never simplistic, and when it comes to complexity, Adderson is a master.”
“The eight stories in A Way to Be Happy vary in circumstance and with equal narrative strength. It’s an impressive collection for how Adderson thematically connects the stories by happiness – sometimes as a brief glimpse, sometimes as an insight that becomes an interior anchor. It typically arrives by means of a human encounter, with the possibility of being life-changing. It’s an illumination that brings comfort and self-awareness, which relate to feelings of belonging. The characters know, in what they’ve experienced from the encounter, this is how it feels to be cared for, or to make a difference, or to cherish what we already have, all pathways to living in contentment, to being happy.”
“Caroline Adderson may have titled her latest book A Way to Be Happy, but the stories within seldom take the clearest path… When collected, the[y] offer a multifaceted, even prismatic investigation into the influence of gender on perception, particularly in moments of fear and loneliness.”
“Her confident, capable, clever prose sweeps the reader through the stories with remarkable ease, and her deft rendering of complicated characters is impressive… [They] struggle, each in their own fashion, and each of them are rendered with humour, and sharply observed detail…This clever and meticulously crafted collection from a writer who has mastered her art is a pleasure to read.”
“Deftly swerving between settings ranging from a modern day Vancouver during the not-so-distant past to a psychiatric hospital circa the early twentieth century; flitting between a spectrum of narrators (including a middle-aged man with a colonoscopy phobia, a young addict out for a night of NYE party-hopping and thieving, a queer woman struggling to manage her depression with the raising of a neuro-divergent child in small town BC, and a sexually vicarious writer in search of a plot). This well-seasoned author has managed to steer clear of the hazards of kitsch or gratuitousness to produce a near-perfect collection about a bunch of very imperfect yet entirely plausible characters and scenarios.”
“Each story in A Way to Be Happy exists within its own world, shaped by the unique characters within it. Whether dealing with a routine colonoscopy, a string of holiday robberies, or moving to a new town, the stories’ uniting factor is, as the title suggests, a consideration of what happiness is—and what it means to find it… Adderson’s prose is straightforward but doesn’t flatline; every word choice feels intentional. When she goes into detail, it is perfectly placed to highlight her characters’ idiosyncrasies, making the reader empathize with their struggles. The beauty of a short story collection is the narrative diversity which means that, hopefully, there can be something for everyone.”