Happy Hour is aptly titled - it's an intoxicating book, at once heartbreaking and joyful.

Rachel Syme, New Yorker staff writerĪ dreamy account of one heady summer, Marlowe Granados's début is a dispatch from another land not only New York City, but youth itself. 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. 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. Marlowe Granados's Happy Hour is as refreshing as a gin fizz. Happy Hour is a novel about getting by and having fun in a world that wants you to do neither. 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. Resources run ever tighter and the strain tests their friendship as they try to convert their social capital into something more lasting than precarious gigs as au pairs, nightclub hostesses, paid audience members, and aspiring foot fetish models. By night, they weave from Brooklyn to the Upper East Side to the Hamptons among a rotating cast of celebrities, artists, Internet entrepreneurs, stuffy intellectuals, and bad-mannered grifters. By day, the girls sell clothes in a market stall, pinching pennies for their Bed-Stuy sublet and bodega lunches. In her diary, Isa describes a sweltering summer in the glittering city. They have little money, but that’s hardly going to stop them from having a good time. She arrives in New York City for a summer of adventure with her best friend, one newly blond Gala Novak. Isa Epley is all of twenty-one years old, and already wise enough to understand that the purpose of life is the pursuit of pleasure. Refreshing and wry in equal measure, Happy Hour is an intoxicating novel of youth well spent. With the verve and bite of Ottessa Moshfegh and the barbed charm of Nancy Mitford, Marlowe Granados’s stunning début brilliantly captures a summer of striving in New York City A stickily hot New York summer is cooly observed in this dazzling debut novel.

Happiest hour strain