Book Talk: Amber Sparks — Happy People Don't Live Here: A Novel - WITH Shannon Sanders

Watch author Amber Sparks' book talk and reading at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.

In this darkly funny gothic tale, a reclusive mother and her saturnine daughter move into a haunted building brimming with eccentrics—and secrets.

Just past the edge of summer, Alice and her daughter, Fern, arrive at the Pine Lake Apartments—a former sanatorium occupied by an ensemble of peculiar neighbors and a smattering of ghosts. Among the living: the Mermaid Lady, who performs in a nightclub fish tank; the building’s handyperson, moonlighting as a medium; and an awkwardly charming professor of medieval studies. Fern alone is acquainted with the undead, who pass like troubled clouds through the apartments, humanity mostly lost ages ago. For the determinedly private Alice, Pine Lake seems the perfect place at the edge of the world to hide herself and her daughter—until the day Fern finds a dead body in the dumpster.

Intent on solving the mystery of this discarded corpse, Fern eagerly puts her encyclopedic knowledge of detective novels to good use while dodging warnings from her increasingly paranoid mother. She soon comes to realize that within the strange tapestry of Pine Lake residents, nothing is ever quite as it seems. Her investigation digs up long-buried secrets, including her mother’s, that implicate each of her neighbors . . . and conjures a new one from beyond the grave.

The hotly anticipated debut novel from “master of the fantastic” (Roxane Gay) Amber Sparks, Happy People Don’t Live Here is an unforgettable portrait of family—whether by birth or by chance or by choice—and the sometimes dangerous myths we make to keep ours together.

Amber Sparks is the author of the short story collections And I Do Not Forgive You and The Unfinished World. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, Slate, and elsewhere. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, daughter, and cats.

Sparks is in conversation with Shannon Sanders, the author of the linked short story collection Company, which won the 2024 Los Angeles Times Book Prize's Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her short fiction has appeared in One Story, Sewanee Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She lives in Silver Spring with her husband and three sons.

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Politics and Prose is a beloved and award-winning staple for book lovers around the nation's capital and the world. In addition to our incredible selection of titles, Politics and Prose offers public book talks with today's leading authors and journalists.

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