It is a wild careening joyride through a hot sultry summer in New York in 2013, and it evokes. Happy Hour is a novel about getting by and looking great in a system that wants you to do neither. Marlowe Granadoss Happy Hour is as refreshing as a gin fizz. 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. using charm as currency for inspiration for Isa and Gala’s movements through a social milieu that’s now on pause.

Resources run 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. For Happy Hour Marlowe Granados studied flappers and adventuresses. By night, they weave from Brooklyn to the Upper East Side to the Hamptons among a rotating cast of celebrities, artists, Internet entrepreneurs, stuffy intellectuals, and bad-mannered grifters.

By day, the girls sell clothes in a market stall, pinching pennies for their Bed-Stuy sublet and bodega lunches. In her diary, Isa describes a sweltering summer in the glittering city. They have little money, but that’s hardly going to stop them from having a good time. The story of how Granados ended up signed to it reads a lot like something that might. She arrives in New York City for a summer of adventure with her best friend, one newly blond Gala Novak. Happy Hour is the first title released by Flying Books, a Canadian publishing house launched in 2019. Dear Marlowe, For a while now, I’ve been steadily losing my ability to endure men. Send your rants and pleas to for Marlowe’s consideration.

Isa Epley is all of twenty-one years old, and already wise enough to understand that the purpose of life is the pursuit of pleasure. n s In DESIGNS FOR LIVING, columnist Marlowe Granados dispenses sound advice in a noisy world. Refreshing and wry in equal measure, Happy Hour is an intoxicating novel of youth well spent.

Happy hour by marlowe granados