Events

An Evening with Naoise Dolan in Conversation with Ania Bas

Tuesday 23rd May 2023
18:00 at Waterstones, Birmingham

The Happy Couple (Hardback)

Naoise Dolan

Odd Hours (Paperback)

Ania Bas, Robyn Holdaway

Join us for a brilliant evening with Naoise Dolan, who returns with an extraordinary second novel ‘The Happy Couple’. A story about love, commitment, monogamy, and betray all set during the most enduringly iconic event in culture – a wedding. Naoise will be in conversation with Ania Bas, author of 'Odd Hours'.

About the Book

This is a novel about five characters, linked by the wedding they are all set to attend. Wil it be the happiest day of their lives? The beginning of the lives they always imagines? Or the end of them?

Meet the happy couple. Luke and Celine, are in mutual unrequited love with each other, set to marry in a year’s time.

The best man, Archie, is meant to want to move up the corporate ladder and on from his love for Luke: yet he stands where he is, admiring the view.

The bridesmaid, Phoebe, Celine’s sister, has no long-term aspirations beyond smoking her millionth cigarette and getting to the bottom of Luke’s frequent unexplained disappearances.

The guest, Vivian, who with the benefit of some emotional distance, methodically observers her friends like ants.

As the wedding approached and these five lives intersect, each character will find themselves looking for a path to their happily ever after – but does it lie at then end of an aisle?

About the Author

Naoise Dolan is an Irish writer born in Dublin. She studied at Trinity College, followed by Oxford University. She writes fiction, essays, criticism and features for publications including The London Review of Books, the Guardian and Vogue. Her debut novel ‘Exciting Times’ was published in 2020 and became an immediate Sunday Times bestseller, widely translated and optioned for TV. She was shortlisted for The Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Dylan Thomas Prize and The Sunday Time Young Writer of the Year Award.

Reviews

“I pure LOVED ‘The Happy Couple’. So witty, observant, wise and funny. Nihilistic about heteronormative relationships but so charmingly done I barely noticed. I cannot tell you how much I enjoyed it.” - Marian Keyes

“I just finished ‘The Happy Couple’ and I loved it – an extremely funny examination of modern love, with depth, bite and poignancy. It will stay with me for long after I turned the final page.” - Daisy Buchanan

“Another sharply-observed story of relationships and identity… best books to look forward to in 2023.” - Pink News

Waterstones, Birmingham

Tuesday 23rd May 2023
18:00

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