Happiness and Love

A Novel

By: Zoe Dubno

Narrated by: Zoe Dubno

One of Vogue’s Best Books of 2025

Following a young woman over the course of one outrageous and insufferable downtown dinner party at the home of her estranged best friends—an artist and curator couple, whom she now realizes stands for everything she detests—Happiness and Love is a piercing debut novel about brazen materialism, self-obsession, and the empty careerism of so-called cultural elites.

Years after escaping New York and the center of its artistic world—a group of self-important, depraved, and unscrupulous artists, curators, and hangers-on—our narrator is back in town. With no plans to see anyone she once knew, she’s wandering around the Lower East Side, thinking about the recent death of her former best friend, Rebecca, when she runs into Eugene, one half of the artist-curator couple at the heart of her old social set. Despite her better judgement, she accepts his invitation to a dinner party. And though the party is held only hours after Rebecca’s funeral, it not a memorial of Rebecca but a dinner held in honor of a young, newly famous actress whose lateness delays the party by hours.

As the guests sip their natural wine and await the actress’s arrival, the narrator, from her perch on the corner seat of a white sofa, silently, systematically, and mercilessly eviscerates them—their manners, their relationships, their delusions and failures, and the complete moral poverty that brings them here, to Nicole and Eugene’s loft on the Bowery. When the guest of honor finally does arrive, she sets in motion a disastrous end to the evening, laying bare the depravity and decadence of the hosts’ empty little lives—a hollowness that the narrator herself knows all too well.

Characters make this read engaging

This is not a book I would pick up as I lean toward nonfiction but the reviews were filled with applause for the nature of the telling so I purchased. No regrets for the listen. The vivid depictions of the characters and their relations with others made identifying the ensemble easy.

Do you like to listen to the elite bear their ugly soul?

Then get this book. It’s a tirade of endless jealousy. And the reader is an amateur. If not for a book club I would have stopped listening after ten minutes. Do not waste your time and money.