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So Happy It Hurts

So Happy It Hurts

Summary

‘This lovely, quirky novel will appeal to fans of Miranda July and Sheila Heti’ Red

Ottila McGregor is thirty years old and has decided it’s time to sort her life out. She’s going to quit drinking, stop cheating and finally find true happiness. Easy, right?

Getting in the way of this plan are:
1. Grace, her best friend, who believes self-improvement is for people in their forties.
2. Mina, her sister, who is mentally ill, and it might be Ottila’s fault.
3. Thales, the Greek guy who works in the hospital cafeteria – probably the best, most dangerous person Ottila’s ever met.

Told through a scrapbook of emails, receipts, therapy transcripts and other ephemera, this is an infectious one-off of a novel that makes you wince and laugh in equal measure.

Reviews

  • [A] raw, funny and untidily generous novel... Ottila belongs to the great sisterhood of the Female Fuck-Up. Not the eroticised trainwrecks male writers love to invent, but the real-deal ones like Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag... As much as you’re rooting for Ottila to get her man, that’s not the point; the point is whether she can gain the moral wisdom to live a better kind of life. She’s an Emma steeped in ethanol.
    Sarah Ditum, Guardian

About the author

Anneliese Mackintosh

Anneliese Mackintosh’s debut short story collection, Any Other Mouth, was published by Freight Books in 2014 and won the Green Carnation Prize. It was also shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize, Saltire Society's First Book Award and the Saboteur Award, and was longlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. Anneliese's short fiction has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio Scotland, and published in magazines and anthologies including the Scotsman, Edinburgh Review, and the Best British Short Stories 2013.
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