The Happiest People in the World

“The funniest and smartest novel I have read in years.” —Hannah Tinti, author The Good Thief

“This novel, good lord, is his best one yet. Brock Clarke portrays, with terrifying accuracy, the lives of people who constantly ruin things without ever quite understanding why or how, which eventually gives way to a strange kind of invulnerability. There is no writer who does this better than he does, creating that wonderful mixture of unexpected, sharp comedy and genuine empathy. The Danes may be the happiest people in the world, but you can easily join those ranks simply by reading this amazing book.” —Kevin Wilson, author of The Family Fang

“If the literary category of ‘mordant fable’ exists at all, it may be because Brock Clarke invented it. The Happiest People in the World is everything we fans have come to love from a Clarke novel: playful and deliriously skewed and somehow balancing between genuinely great-hearted and gloriously weird.”  —Lauren Groff, author of Arcadia

“Brock Clarke’s hilarious new novel starts out in rural Denmark, then takes us someplace really foreign and utterly weird: upstate New York. The parallel universe Clarke creates there is both our world and not, and like his baffled, yearning characters, we navigate it with surprise and wonder.” —Richard Russo, author of Elsewhere

“Murder, arson, adultery, drugging and drinking, cruel politics--reading a book crammed with such activities can make the timid and yearning among us feel like the happiest people in the world.” —Edith Pearlman, auhor of Binocular Vision

“Like no other writer in contemporary American literature, Brock Clarke has a way of looking at us, I mean looking straight at us--warts, lots of warts, and beauty and hypocrisy and love, too, the gamut. And he’s done it again in his brilliant The Happiest People in the World . . . I for one am grateful he’s out there—watching our every move.” —Peter Orner, author of Esther Stories