Naoise Dolan

An intimate, sharply funny novel about a couple heading toward their wedding, and the three friends who may draw them apart

Meet Celine and Luke. For all intents and purposes, the happy couple.

Luke (a serial cheater) and Celine (more inter­ested in piano than domestic life) plan to marry in a year.

Archie (the best man) should be moving on from his love for Luke and up the corporate ladder, but he finds himself utterly stuck.

Phoebe (the bridesmaid and Celine’s sister) just wants to get to the bottom of Luke’s frequent unexplained disappearances.

And Vivian (a wedding guest) is the only one with any emotional distance and observes her friends like ants in a colony.

As the wedding approaches and their five lives intersect, these characters will each look for a path to the happily ever after—but does it lie at the end of an aisle?

In her wry, sprightly, and unmistakable voice, Naoise Dolan makes the marriage plot entirely her own in a sparkling ensemble novel that is both ferociously clever and supremely enjoyable.

A Novel

The Happy Couple

But they'd been together for three years, and Celine measured their relationship in clutter. Luke's battered paperbacks lined the windowsills; he'd procured a coffee grinder and half a cat. The other half was hers, and the asset would be difficult to divide, so hopefully they were in it for the long haul.

'I guess one of us has to. Like - I think back a lot to when you said you didn't want a relationship. And I said, eventually I want one with someone, but not a guy I've just met, so for now we're good.Then later I said if you still didn't want anything serious, we should stop. And you said you'd changed your mind. Sometimes I think you'd always wanted us to be together. You just couldn't acknowledge it until I did.' Another pause.' If I need to say things aloud before you'll even say them in your head,' Celine said, 'then that's not my favourite quality of yours. It's not an aspect I'd bring to a desert island if I could only take three. But I'd still have a hard time choosing. Actually, I'd find it impossible, picking only three things. Probably I love all of you. And I think for me that means I want to be with you forever.' Then Luke asked.

He stroked her ankle, arnd said: 'l got our country man- ager to say" we're standing athwart the market".' 

He was a communications strategist at a multinational tech firm that had bought up Dublin's docklands for its headquarters. Luke took a morbid interest in company lingo. Initially he'd restricted himself to writing it all down, but soon he was making up his own. Office jargon was weirdly nautical — 'onboarding', 'run a tight ship' — so he drew from there, and waited to see which words spread.

Tastes as static as Aunt Maggy's will occasionally find that fashion has revolved to meet them. Maggy despised carpets, and had weathered the wall-to-wall decades in the knowledge her time would come. Her pride and joy, the polished maple floors, once more announced: rich people live here. She was presently wrong on her other love, patterns. Her floral velvet curtains were not in vogue. But stay standing where you are — and vogue, like Fedex, will call again. 

Not 'so that'. As in nobody signed up. There's no form that says 'Please write your name if you would like to harvest wheat in service of Western art'.

But that's the economy in which music is made.

This can be true, and it can also be true that Celine's got fewer servants than Liszt. 

At that tram stop, at any tram stop, we'll always find things to talk about.

'll say something about a man's leather shoes — 'The cracks on shoes are kind of like the backs of hands' — and that there's symmetry, you know, hands and feet. Or if not that, you'll notice something else. And I'll think of stuff, too. I'll say, 'There's also a symmetry between the round shiny coins and round shiny cobblestones.' Or I won't say that, because I'm not a complete bellend, but anyway. Main thing is — I can make completely pointless remarks to you, and you can make them to me.

Because it's not pointless. You saying it is the point. 

That's what Irish dads do. They assign everyone a thing, and then they keep asking the person if they still do that thing. You could plan ahead if you wanted. If you're about to meet a middle-aged Irish man and you want to choose the content of his Irish dad joke, you could wear a yellow hat. Then, even if you never wear the hat again, every time you see him he'll go: 'Ah now what happened the yellow hat there now?'

They're showing they remembered your thing.

And they choose their things fucking randomly, don't get me wrong. There's zero overlap between what you think is your thing and what an Irish dad deems your thing. 

The Happy Couple quotes

Join the club