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This Happy

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When Alannah was twenty-three, she met a man who was older than her - a married man - and fell in love. Things happened suddenly. They met in April, in the first bit of mild weather; and in August, they went to stay in rural Ireland, overseen by the cottage's landlady.

Six years later, when Alannah is newly married to another man, she sees the landlady from afar. Memories of those days spent in bliss, then torture, return to her. And the realisation that she has been waiting - all this time - to be rediscovered.

311 pages, Hardcover

First published June 11, 2020

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Niamh Campbell

12 books27 followers

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5 stars
73 (8%)
4 stars
186 (22%)
3 stars
270 (32%)
2 stars
198 (23%)
1 star
114 (13%)
Displaying 1 - 30 of 121 reviews
Profile Image for Corina Romonti.
101 reviews16 followers
April 6, 2020
Such a beautiful cover but such a huge disappointment. It's terribly overworked and laboured and just try-hard in a "writing by numbers" style. The metaphors and descriptions killed me, such awfully written sex scenes. Comparing an erect penis to a fevered child was a particular low point in my opinion. And I'm definitely not a prude. For a book written by a woman it was very penis- centric! I love a good penis chat as much as the next person but I prefer it to be well written. I stopped counting how many times the main character "serviced" penises (a few!). Completely baffling reading experience!
Profile Image for Katarína Laurošková.
49 reviews6 followers
April 20, 2020
I have seen This Happy mentioned in a magazine and intrigued by the title and the cover, I have decided to read it soon after. Unfortunately, I didn't enjoy it very much.

While reading it, but even more after, I still cannot understand the main idea behind this book. I understood the main plot of a woman who is remembering her past relationship and simultaneously overthinking her current marriage. I cannot even say if she loves her husband or she regrets it. Maybe she doesn't either.

The writing style is chaotic and does not read easily. I assume that this work is author's beginning of writing, so maybe the style will improve by then. Cause now it just feels like trying way too hard for absolutely no reason.
I would also recommend to make characters more interesting and not only focused on themselves.

Don't let me start about the sex scenes, please.

Overall, I would not consider this book to be groundbreaking in any way, with a lot of room for improvement.
Profile Image for Bookthesp1.
214 reviews11 followers
June 22, 2020
This is a tricksy book. The end covers have an author photo that is so posed I wondered if she was being arch and ironic. The front cover has a striking painting of a girl a little like the author but it’s not her. This is yet another debut novel by a female Irish writer. After Anna Burns. Sally Rooney and Nicole Flattery we have this writer. Do they have a factory in Dublin churning them out fully formed as writers !?
Still if you like a plot this probably won’t be your bag. There really isn’t one. Nothing really happens ( the Samuel Beckett effect?)
Alannah the main character does an interior monologue recounting her dalliance with a married writer in parallel to her later marriage to a dashing teacher spread over two timeframes. It appears to be the women needing men plot that is the staple of romantic fiction - there’s a fashionable age gap thing going on in the first relationship and some sexual content. So far so Sally Rooney.
What makes this a five star novel is the quality of the writing . It’s a debut so Niamh Campbell throws every allusion, metaphor and descriptive firework into bringing this plotless thing alive . It could be overwritten and probably is but there are joyful and fiendishly clever sentences on every page and a poetic Joyceian?? Hook that well, hooks you. At times it’s breath takingly good and keeps both the characters, milieu and situations in stark relief. Highly recommend if u simply want to bathe in joyful allusion and sentence construction to die for. As a reader it made me this happy and much more. Admired it more than I loved it but boy- it really is something to admire. Looking forward to reading Campbell’s next book and will seek out her writing for journals preceding this. This writer has an amazing career ahead of her.
Profile Image for Charlotte.
10 reviews2 followers
July 19, 2020
Usually I love book about “nothing”, those books that really dive into relationships... but this was not for me.
It felt like it was trying to be too arty, and so I couldn’t get properly absorbed into the story. I really enjoyed the first 150 pages or so, but it was downhill after that :(
1,590 reviews18 followers
October 18, 2020
I pushed through and finished this to see if it went anywhere, and sadly it didn’t. The narrator is self indulgent and shallow. Her motives for doing things, like marrying,seem artificial. I just wanted to slap her. This genre is not for me.
Profile Image for Barry.
600 reviews
July 13, 2020
Writerly but hollow. I just couldn't care about anyone or anything in it.
Profile Image for Eve.
188 reviews6 followers
January 18, 2025
I am reading dud after dud at the minute, sick of it. This book was poorly written with overworked metaphors and a superiority complex.
Profile Image for Rachel.
1,573 reviews141 followers
July 23, 2021
I am puzzled by this book. I’ve spent most of this year having to prepare tiresome presentations that include ‘aims’ and ‘objectives’, which are different from ‘methods’ in subtle but crucial ways. The method of this book is obvious: it’s half pseudo-memoir, half pseudo-auto fiction, and all pretentious.* Its aim is, I suppose, to tell the story of an Intellectual Woman who despite her frequently-enumerated smarts stumbles into a relationship with a married man not once, but twice. She appears to view the married state in her partners as a personality quirk, akin to enjoying raisin scones. She fails to use her prodigious intellect to identify what a scourge infidelity is on ninety-nine percent of relationships. As for the book's objectives … boring the reader to death? Creating huge confusion about why anyone would date this stuck-up, self-obsessed dullard with ugly feet? Trying to see how far we can take this naked emperor parade in literary fiction?

*The friend who loaned me this book describes herself as ‘quirky, but not in a threatening way’. This book is experimental, but not in a threatening way. Of course, we do not have dialogue tags, god forbid we employ the tools of the bourgeoisie or whatever is the reasoning behind not separating out dialogue from prose**. At no point does Campbell cross the boundaries into something that would be too confessional or too difficult, which are the tiresome, drought-ravaged countries in which memoir and auto-fiction abide.

**Actually, my personal theory is that ‘not using dialogue tags’ correlates directly with ‘not using contractions’, which in turn correlates with ‘hi, I cannot write dialogue’. I have yet to read one of these literary fiction puff pieces narrated by a navel that doesn’t follow this method, ergo I believe we’ve scored a hit against the null hypothesis. Check out this two-for-one example:

“But surely, he insisted, it is a waste of money to throw it into the sea? They are expensive, are they not?”

Are they not. Are they fucking not. (I’m not arguing with the Hiberno-English construction of answer-question, but it would be: ‘Sure they’re expensive, aren’t they?’)

There were, early on, a quantity of good descriptions in the novel that made me hope for better things in its overall execution. Sadly, my hopes were dashed on the rocks of Campbell’s disdain for bougie shit like ‘character arcs’ and ‘plot’ and ‘motivations that make sense’. There’s also so much description that it’s like being shown a buffet of patisserie when all you wanted was a take-away croissant. Still, bits of it are undeniably good on a sentence level.

“I had broken it emphatically but, surprised at myself, snapped back at the sandy crack […]”

“[…] my train began to creep in, with a series of short faint screeches like the scraping of a plate […]”

“I began to wear those water-colour city clothes, riverbed-fawn for autumn and ice-blue for winter, indifferent duck-eggs and past pink, cut like sandwich boards or pinafores with no ruches, no florals or frills. Seashells. Dresses like the cell of an anchoress.”

“He had cornflake-coloured curls.”

Alannah herself is the typical Unlikeable Heroine of whom I am very, very, very tired. If nothing else, can we retire UH through sheer ubiquity? It’s not cool or unusual to do this any longer. Consider the mould well and truly broken, thank you next.

“Writing for instance was something I did instead of eating. It was alien and demanding and godly, dissolving time, depositing me half-insane on peaks and city streets, at kitchen tables, in cafés, dazedly post-coital and amazed.”

Sure Jan.

“Their children smelled to me of margarine and seemed raised by the boom of great monster TVs and since I was priggish and bookish and highly strung I cultivated a defensive hauteur.”

You married a man you met in a train station, but go off, I guess.

“I was such a burningly ambitious girl, but my husband, I thought now, could be described as not ambitious but entitled, a totally different mantle of effortless authority that was never more threatened than in the daily life we shared. I, for all my casualness, was doing well.”

ARE U THO

ARE U DOING WELL ALANNAH

by no marker of ‘well’ would I consider you doing well

“We are not in the business of giving out free and scare therapy appointments to people who feel merely unhappy.”

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? THE WHOLE THERAPY BUSINESS MODEL IS PREDICATED ON UNHAPPY PEOPLE PAYING FOR SOMEONE TO THERAPISE THEM INTO HAPPINESS! In fact this bankrolls pro bono work with more difficult mental health cases, in the same way Harry Markle’s memoir is going to subsidise a whole bunch of midlist authors for PenguinRandomHouseHachetteSimonandhisfriends.

“When I talk about art I get earnest and confident and feel foolishly free to move into the territory of love, discursively. People back away in embarrassment. I don’t know if I blame them. They think I’m insane. People are so boring.”

Nah bruv, you’re just bad at conversing.

And I had to lol at the earnest conversation Alannah has with unnamed gal pals about what they’d trade Mephistopheles for love. A true modern Faustian bargain isn’t giving up your future children in exchange for love, it’s whether you’d sacrifice your entire life portion of dignity to appear on Love Island in order to attain love. Whatever pulse Campbell has her finger on, it’s not modern life as lived by most people. In fact, I think she’s trying to raise a corpse.
Profile Image for Beth Younge.
1,242 reviews8 followers
December 9, 2024
This was quite dissapoiting and i expected it to be much better than it was. I found the main character and her two love interests to be dull and i didn't really have much drive to read this. I managed 50% of this and the story still felt like it was going nowhere. The back promised a book that sounded much more interesting but it just didn't deliver. It was too much of a slow burn for me overall.

I received this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
Profile Image for hajduk.
42 reviews
August 10, 2023
lol at the hate reviews from yank & brit dullards
Profile Image for The Grim Reader Podcast.
108 reviews8 followers
August 30, 2021
I had high hopes for this book after reading rave reviews before its release. Unfortunately, this book did not live up to its acclaim in my opinion. The novel is very disjointed and confusedly paced. To keep track of what happens you have to be incredibly concentrated while reading. I found that although parts were very well written, but altogether it felt overworked.

The characters were unlikable, and to be honest, I have no idea what they saw in each other. There is not much to catch the reader’s attention. Our narrator is self-interested, a snob with a chip on her shoulder. Her two love interests are unmemorable.

I really don’t like giving a negative review, and I am struggling to find anything positive to write. I think that this could have been something great, but it became laboured and overworked.

Rebecca, 1/3 of The Grim Readers.
Profile Image for shauna.
308 reviews205 followers
April 25, 2025
a woman absolutely losing her mind over a lover is my favorite genre

this story is completely unstructured and sometimes read like a word salad. maybe we were supposed to relate to our main character while reading because damn, this took some serious brain power to get through
Profile Image for Pádraig Mac Oscair.
80 reviews10 followers
July 31, 2024
Can't help but feel this tale of a precocious PHD student trapped in an unhappy marriage to a much older wealthy man is, intentionally or otherwise, a Sally Rooney novel viciously attacking people like Sally Rooney.
Profile Image for Jasper Godden.
74 reviews1 follower
July 28, 2023
When I described this book to my girlfriend it was as “you can tell this book was written by somebody who just graduated creative writing. All big words, over complicated sentences and no substance”. The actions of the characters don’t make sense to me, they’re underdeveloped and boring. Why does she care about Harry? What’s with all these books about women who tear themselves apart over a man who the reader knows hardly anything about. Maybe I zoned out the whole book but I think it would be way more interesting to see the turmoil of a long term situation-ship unravel or an affair with a married man where he can’t leave or there’s complications beyond him being married etc. the part I liked was when allanah refers to herself as somebody whose seen as a performance and when you have been taught that your whole life, why not perform? Aside from that, would not especially recommend this book to anyone. There can be books where very little happens, that focus on the characters minute relationships but you have to write characters that people care about.
Profile Image for Marin.
9 reviews
March 26, 2024
Not at all a traditionally written book, and not a book for everyone, to be read at any given time, but I love that. It’s lyrical, nostalgic, heartbreaking, obsessive at times, and raw. The feeling of “I can tell this part of my life will be so important for me that I need to make sure I’m noting down every emotion I feel, conversations and debates that don’t seem all that important, mundane activities I do on the daily - I know in a few years or decades, I will want to look back on this exact week, month or year of my life” executed so beautifully.
Profile Image for Maddy.
32 reviews2 followers
September 15, 2020
Quite possibly one of the most confusing, plotless books I’ve ever read.
Profile Image for Grace.
10 reviews
July 3, 2023
It feels a little bit harsh to give this 3/5. I really wanted to like it and I think it’s well written but the plot didn’t grip me and I just felt a little detached while reading.
Profile Image for Carmen Sánchez.
48 reviews1 follower
March 6, 2024
2.75/5

El primer libro de 2024! Lo compré en Dublín y le tengo mucho cariño, pero me ha costado muuucho terminarlo, no sé si porque no lo he podido leer con continuidad y me ha costado reengancharme cada vez, o si por el libro en sí.

La protagonista, Alannah, es una chica joven que no supera una aventura que tuvo con un hombre casado hace 7 años, y que compara constantemente esa etapa de su vida con su vida de casada de ahora. Me llama la atención que su marido es eso, "su marido", durante todo el libro. Es el único personaje que no tiene nombre.

El problema: ¡no pasa naaaada en todo el libro! Y yo voy a tope con el "no plot just vibes", pero creo que con esto se excede un poco. Es precioso en cuanto a la manera de escribir, eso sí, si te sientas a concentrarte un rato es como leer poesía y ves las imágenes en tu cabeza como si estuvieras viendo una peli. También me han gustado muchas de las parrafadas sobre el paso del tiempo, el no superar ciertas relaciones........ Una chica a veces necesita reafirmación.

Sentimientos encontradísimos. Creo que no lo recomendaría.
Profile Image for Matthew Anderson.
11 reviews
April 9, 2021
“If you could dive into an old life- something you never protected when it was happening, something you believed to be a prelude at the time- if you could dive in like one dives into love, or fall slowly over a precipice into it, enthralled, would you do this?”

I have mixed feelings about this book.

One of the things I love about a book is when I feel completely immersed in the character’s first-hand experience. At times this novel delivers that, poignantly and unflinchingly. But more often it devolves into introspective meandering, which in the absence of a true plot makes for difficult reading. I read this book quite quickly, less because I was enthralled and more because I wanted it to be over so I could move onto something meatier. There were moments where Campbell’s poetic writing really shone, evidenced above. Unfortunately, those moments were ensconced in an aimless, discursive prose.
Profile Image for Abi.
730 reviews
January 30, 2021
I read this for my dissertation.

I did not like the writing, I did not like the characters, there was basically no plot, and I just felt extremely confused.

This book could also be extremely triggering for a lot of people, as it does deal with mental health, especially depression, self-harm, and suicidal thoughts, in quite a lot of detail, so make sure you are going into this book informed.
Profile Image for QUYNH NGUYEN.
65 reviews7 followers
January 6, 2023
3-3.5 ⭐️
Some lines were cracking and so tender I needed a hold of my heart. But the storytelling needs to be more focused to get the point across. It was a pleasant reads still
Profile Image for Chloe.
359 reviews19 followers
September 10, 2023
unfortunately i did not enjoy this. there was no discernible plot, and the writing of the main character, Alannah, was not strong enough to carry a character driven novel on its own.
Profile Image for Abbey Mason.
9 reviews2 followers
August 20, 2024
Couldn’t bare to read this book. Got a few chapters in and didn’t even know what I was reading. The descriptions are painful and very difficult to follow
Profile Image for Leanna Coleman.
39 reviews
December 14, 2025
⭐️⭐️⭐️ 2.5-3*
I really wanted to enjoy this but I couldn’t get on board with the main character and her existential thoughts/ victim behaviour 😭
Profile Image for Amy Rabjohn.
85 reviews
July 19, 2024
Had quite a strong start and I was really intrigued and this it just turned really whiny and I feel I just watched a woman make the same mistake with two men.

Not my cup of tea.
Profile Image for Emer  Tannam.
910 reviews22 followers
June 2, 2021
3.5

This book is right up my alley, in that nothing really happens except EMOTIONS, and its written by an Irish woman. I read it very eagerly, and enjoyed the style for the most part, but at the same time there was something very irritating about it.

I think its the level of solemnity that is attached to the love affair. Now, I know the book is basically about this love affair, and the effect it has on her later life, but the way she goes on you'd swear she was the only person in the world to ever have had her heart broken, and she is almost entirely humourless about it. Having had my own heart broken at 25 by a 40 year old man, I can tell you that it is tragic, but it was not without its moments of humour. So yeah, its a bit too po-faced at times.

I also hated the ending. Having dabbled with poetical language throughout, she doubled down for the ending, in that I didn't really understand what had happened. Why was she in hospital? Where was her husband? Why was she referring to her baby as "it"? What?

But I still liked it a lot. It felt very real. I'm looking forward to reading more of her work.
Profile Image for Cassie.
26 reviews
January 29, 2025
*1.5. So proud of myself for finishing this waffly mess
Displaying 1 - 30 of 121 reviews

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