Happy Land

By: Dolen Perkins-Valdez

A woman learns the astonishing truth of her family’s ties to a vanished American Kingdom in this riveting new novel from the New York Times bestselling, NAACP Image Award-winning author of Take My Hand.

Nikki hasn’t seen her grandmother in years, due to a mysterious estrangement inherited from her mother. So when the elder calls out of the blue with an urgent request for Nikki to visit her in the hills of western North Carolina, Nikki hesitates only for a moment. After years of silence in her family, she’s determined to learn the truth while she still can.

But instead of answers about the recent past, Mother Rita tells Nikki an incredible story of a kingdom on this very mountain, and of her great-great-great grandmother, Luella, who would become its queen.

It sounds like the makings of a fairy tale—royalty among a community of freed people. But the more Nikki learns about the Kingdom of the Happy Land, and the lives of those who dwelled in the ruins she discovers in the woods, the more she realizes how much of her identity and her family’s secrets are wrapped up in these hills. Because this land is their legacy, and it will be up to her to protect it before it, like so much else, is stolen away.

Inspired by true events, Happy Land is a transporting multi-generational novel about the stories that shape us and the dazzling courage it takes to dream.

©2025 Dolen Perkins-Valdez (P)2025 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“What a story! Happy Land is an exhilarating tale of perseverance, identity, and love that echoes across generations. This story of formerly enslaved families in the Blue Ridge Mountains who built a community against all odds will stay with me for a long time.”—Charmaine Wilkerson, New York Times bestselling author of Black Cake

"Picture a time when a kingdom existed inside the confines of the Carolinas—a time when freedpeople were royalty. What if that was your history, instead of the trauma of enslavement and generational poverty? As Dolen Perkins-Valdez says in this astonishing, historical-based novel—a family tree isn’t just something you draw on paper. It’s only when you’re rooted in the soil that your family once inhabited that your imagination can brush the sky.”—Jodi Picoult, #1 New York Times bestselling author of By Any Other Name

"No one writes the historical novel quite like Dolen Perkins-Valdez, and with Happy Land, she’s at her brilliant best, opening History’s treasure-filled chest—and then, bringing that history to life. Here is the Ancestor who cried, laughed, and hoped before any of us were born. Here is the vulnerable earth that tenders its secrets. In Happy Land, Perkins-Valdez offers the knowledge that we surely need: to move forward, we must understand what came before. Her existing fans will be so satisfied—and her new readers will be captivated."—Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, New York Times bestselling author of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois