Happiness and Love

By: Zoe Dubno

Narrated by: Zoe Dubno

Brought to you by Penguin.

Years after escaping her unbearable artworld friends in New York for a new life in London, an unnamed writer finds herself back on the Lower East Side attending a dinner party hosted by Eugene and Nicole – an artist-curator couple – and attended by their pretentious circle. It’s the evening after the funeral of their mutual friend, a failed actress, and if the narrator once loved and admired Eugene and Nicole and their important friends, she now despises them all. Most of all, however, she despises herself for being lured back to this cavernous apartment, to this hollow, bourgeois social set, for a dinner party that isn’t even being thrown in their deceased friend’s honour, but in the honour of an up-and-coming actress who is by now several hours late.

As the guests sip at their drinks and await the actress’s arrival, the narrator, from her vantage point in the corner seat of a white sofa entertains herself - and us - with a silent, tender, merciless takedown.

'Zeitgeist and timeless, cynical but not soulless... [For] anyone who has ever wondered “What the hell am I doing here?” Fabulous!' Melissa Broder, author of Milk Fed

© Zoe Dubno 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

Critic reviews

Deliciously scathing . . . Judgemental yet self-aware, caustic yet warm, Dubno’s book will have you yelping in recognition – either at the state of your own friendships (or depending on your lifestyle and bank balance) at the characters on the page.

Zingy . . . Told in a single long , savage and hilarious paragraph, Happiness and Love can be gulped in one delicious go.

A gorgeous book on being a hater, and I inhaled this in one sitting.

Breathless, damning, funny, elegiac . . . The achievement here is unquestionably substantial. Dubno has managed to write a work of high style that is also a document of real emotion. (Madeline Cash)

Zeitgeist and timeless, cynical but not soulless, Dubno’s propulsive debut is for lovers of Thomas Bernhard, art over theory, and anyone who has ever wondered “What the hell am I doing here?” Fabulous!

Exceptionally funny and entertaining.

As observant as a sniper, and just as ruthless, Zoe Dubno in Happiness and Love pulls off an unlikely yet ultimately very successful literary metempsychosis. Bernhard's fierce sarcasm and disappointment resonate very clearly in her voice; despite the distance that separates his 1980s Vienna from her contemporary New York, Dubno shows us – at times comically, at times despairingly – that the superficiality, hypocrisy, and flatness never change.

Zoe Dubno examines character and human relations in the same way an art critic looks at a painting. Digging deeper and deeper into the thoughts behind thoughts, feelings behind feelings and questioning everything, Happiness and Love is an ecstatic performance of heightened perception.

In Happiness and Love, Zoe Dubno viciously and delightfully skewers the vapid people – the neo-bohemians of the social media age – who masquerade their privilege as creativity. It is bracing and funny and fiercely clever, a first novel of extraordinary confidence and profoundly entertaining wickedness.

I loved this astute and hilarious skewering of New York’s psuedy cultural elite. Intelligent, relentless, nasty and fun, Happiness and Love is energising, vital and a total joy to read.