Happy Hour

By: Marlowe Granados

Narrated by: Bronwyn Szabo

“A wild ride with a brilliantly cocky young protagonist who’s got the world wrapped around her finger. So propulsive you'll feel like you've been hypnotized.” (Zoe Whittall, author of The Best Kind of People)

“Happy Hour feels like a breathless whisper at six in the morning when it’s too hot to sleep. Marlowe Granados is a fresh, exciting new voice in fiction, and Happy Hour is a spellbinding début.” (Amy Jones, author of We’re All in This Together and Every Little Piece of Me)

With the verve and bite of My Year of Rest and Relaxation and the whip-smart, wisecracking sensibility of a golden-age Hollywood heroine, Marlowe Granados’ stunning début brilliantly captures a summer of striving in New York City.

Refreshing and wry in equal measure, Happy Hour is an intoxicating novel of youth well spent. Isa Epley is all of 21 years old and already wise enough to understand that the purpose of life is the pursuit of pleasure. She arrives in New York City for a summer of adventure with her best friend, one newly blonde Gala Novak. They have little money, but that’s hardly going to stop them from having a good time.

In her diary, Isa describes a sweltering summer in the glittering city. By day, the girls sell clothes in a market stall, pinching pennies for their Bed-Stuy sublet and bodega lunches. By night, they weave from Brooklyn to the Upper East Side to the Hamptons among a rotating cast of celebrities, artists, tech entrepreneurs, stuffy intellectuals, and bad-mannered grifters. Money runs 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. 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.

Happy Hour announces a dazzling new talent in Marlowe Granados, whose exquisite wit recalls Anita Loos’ 1925 classic, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, updated to evoke a recent, golden period of hope and transformation - the summer of 2013. A cri de cœur for party girls and anyone who has ever felt entitled to an adventure of their own, Happy Hour is an effervescent tonic for the ails of contemporary life.

Bespeak Audio Editions brings Canadian voices to the world with audiobook editions of some of the country’s greatest works of literature, performed by Canadian actors.

©2021 Marlowe Granados (P)2021 Bespeak Audio Editions

Critic reviews

“Marlowe Granados's Happy Hour is as refreshing as a gin fizz. 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. 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.” (Rachel Syme, New Yorker staff writer)

“Happy Hour is a wild ride with a brilliantly cocky young protagonist who’s got the world wrapped around her finger. So propulsive you'll feel like you've been hypnotized.” (Zoe Whittall, author of The Best Kind of People)

“A dreamy account of one heady summer, Marlowe Granados’s debut is a dispatch from another land; not only New York City, but youth itself. Happy Hour is aptly titled - it’s an intoxicating little book, at once heartbreaking and joyful.” (Rumaan Alam, author of Rich and Pretty and That Kind of Mother)

The style

Amazing work !! Live the characters and dynamics. Great piece of art. Can’t wait for more.

Wanted to like it.

Was looking for something low stakes to listen to while up late with newborn. It is indeed low stakes and does very much give Anita Loos whom I love but is from another time. I think trying to do something similar now comes off as boring and disingenuous and doesn’t really suit modern sensibilities? I could be wrong about that. I don’t know. Didn’t hate it. But I could see how someone could.

I won’t say the main character is unsympathetic as I think most characters deserve some level of sympathy but there is something underdeveloped about her that annoyed me.

understated brilliance

the actress was able to capture the perceived airiness of the authors prose with finesse.
i thought this novel was brilliant and very much enjoyed the accompaniment.
brilliant and understated.

Simple, lovely, charming.

I loved this book. It was a nice break from some of the heavier stuff I’ve been reading, and it, to me, encapsulated what it’s like to be a 20-something on the move.