I HOPE YOU’RE HAPPY

Exceptional short stories featuring young millennial women, blending dark fantasy and quasi-horror with humour and intellectual dash.

Announcing the arrival of a major talent, I HOPE YOU’RE HAPPY is more a warning than a wish.

Photos of women eating go viral, a cookie communicates a threat, and women working dead-end jobs become entangled in the performances around them. Everyday experiences of friendship, family, dating and desire catapult the reader into a creepy vortex of horror. Characters reveal themselves in slippery glimpses, through positive affirmations, social media accounts and secret appetites.

With this collection of haunting and haunted stories, Marni Appleton immerses us in a world of fleeting encounters, empty couplings, break ups, bust ups, threesomes and ghosts, giving us a kaleidoscopic overview of twenty-first century life.

Praise

‘Marni Appleton delivers a thunderous first collection of stories… The joy and bewildering horror of being young and female in the 21st century, trying to negotiate traditional relationships and plain old human desire, is parsed in pithy, dark and often ruthless scenarios.’
— The Irish Times

‘Appleton’s wry observational style is well suited to these tales of young women navigating the modern world. She writes with empathy for her vulnerable protagonists, conveying their inner conflicts and deceptions.’
— The Observer

‘Hair-raising, eye-popping and thought-provoking.’
— Nuala McGovern, BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour

‘I Hope You’re Happy by Marni Appleton is a debut collection of short stories that absolutely blew me away.’
— Gráinne O’Hare, IMAGE magazine

‘Shifting between the first and third person, [Appleton’s] stories forensically dissect the subtle power dynamics of relationships’
— Irish Examiner

‘Appleton writes beautifully about relationships between characters, especially at their messiest, with overstepped and unclear boundaries pushing them towards and away from one another.’
— Mslexia

‘These short stories are a must-read for fans of unpredictable, politically-attuned fiction about what it means to be a woman in a modern world.’
— Arts Hub

‘Reason alone to pick up British writer Marni Appleton’s debut short story collection, I Hope You’re Happy. She writes with incisiveness and raw honesty, covering the subjects of sex, social media and ambition. These are stories of desire and yearning in the 21st century: of indecision, anxiety and intimacy. If you’re a fan of short stories, add this biting, youthful collection to your TBR pile (complete with Rooney-esque lack of speech marks).’
— Pandora Sykes, Country & Town House Magazine

‘The characters may stumble into horror-tinged scenarios, but the storytelling is sharp, darkly funny and deft.’
— The Daily Mail

‘Appleton can stretch suspense through a story, binding her reader to the page, so effectively it should be studied . . . a fire alarm couldn’t have torn me from this book.’
— Full Stop

‘These beautifully written, female-focused stories stayed with me long past closing the cover. Sensual, alive and haunting. Dark wisps of womanhood.’
— Lucy Prebble, Executive Producer and writer on the Bafta, Golden Globe and Emmy award-winning HBO drama Succession

‘This collection of wry and incisive stories explores navigating the sticky, glorious and more-often-than-not absolutely horrific terrain of late girlhood and early womanhood.’
— Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi, author of The Centre

‘Truthful, dark, and walking the line between delicious and disturbing, I HOPE YOU’RE HAPPY is a rich and haunting read. Savour or gorge, this is a very special collection of deceptively cutting stories.’
— Lottie Hazell, author of Piglet

‘These tense stories of the zeitgeist show how the conditions of late capitalism promise women freedom while keeping them trapped in their economic and social circumstances. Clever, convincing and wry, they bowled me over. Like Mary Gaitskill and Miranda July before her, Marni Appleton writes about how it is to live now.’
— Julia Bell, author of Hymnal and Radical Attention

‘Marni Appleton writes with insight, honesty and inventiveness into the raw, brutal spaces of girlhood and early womanhood. A powerful, political collection that maps intimately the minds and bodies of its characters, these stories stayed with me long after I’d finished.’
— Fran Littlewood, author of Amazing Grace Adams

‘Such a wonderful collection, the writing so sharp, witty, dark, carefully observed and full of the realities of present day life.’
— Gerard Woodward, author of Legoland and I’ll Go to Bed at Noon

‘Raw, fluid, intimate and believable.’
— Mariel Franklin, author of Bonding

‘Deliciously dark, incisive and original, Marni Appleton has clearly mastered the short story, but more than that, she has mastered the art of winding her readers in ribbons of mess and mundanity that make up both fantastical and real life in a truly compelling collection.’
— Ore Agbaje-Williams, author of The Three of Us

‘Glittering behind every fixed-on smile in this collection is a crystallised seam of horror. An illegally acquired cocktail of weirdness, body laughs, love and spite. I could not have liked it more.’
— Ben Pester, author of Am I in the Right Place?

‘Tender, skewed and affecting stories told with a keen eye for the absurd and unsettling nature of being alive. A bewitching and twisted kaleidoscope of stories.’
— Isy Suttie, award-winning comedian and writer

‘Appleton knows all the ways that women are seen, surveilled, and regarded. These excellent stories stare right back, and they brim over with insight and sharp intelligence.’
— Manuel Muñoz, author of The Consequences