Praise for A Way to Be Happy
"Adderson . . . is a deft, masterful storyteller whose literary fiction surely deserves more attention."
—Kirkus Reviews (starred)
"The characters in these stories from veteran of the form Caroline Adderson range from thieving addicts to a Russian hit man to a middle-aged man facing a routine colonoscopy. Through these varied characters and their disparate conflicts, Adderson explores happiness—how we find it and what it means when we do."
—Quill & Quire
"A superb and unique collection. Intricate, compassionate, complex, its every sentence carefully built, tested, and polished, each story draws the reader into the life of a character hurtling or meandering towards the consequences of their own choices and to the story’s necessary conclusion. They will by turn flood you with unexpected sympathy, lighten your mood, or leave you with a puzzle you can’t quite solve. No one else writes short fiction the way Caroline Adderson does, and there are only eight stories in the book. The way to be happiest is to savour each one."
—Kathy Page, Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize-winning author of Dear Evelyn
"Caroline Adderson's voice is as vivid as ever in this exciting new collection, and her characters are unfailingly mesmerizing—distinctive, unpredictable, somehow like everyone yet no one you've ever met before."
—Lynn Coady, author of Watching You Without Me
"Caroline Adderson builds terrific suspense from her characters’ lonely, off-centre lives. Each story in A Way to Be Happy is its own mysterious world, shaped by her outstanding powers of imagination and sympathy."
—Elizabeth Hay, author of Snow Road Station
"Caroline Adderson is one of Canada's best short story writers. A brilliant stylist, her inventive sentences are the trademark of a literary pro."
—Susan Swan, author of the upcoming memoir Big Girls Don’t Cry
Praise for Caroline Adderson
“All of Adderson’s characters are rounded and all have utility, not simply as plot devices but as part of a striving, suffering whole.”
—New York Times Book Review
“Caroline Adderson treats the domestic drama with elegance and wit, and what she has to say about her characters and their circumstances is often profound.”
—Meg Wolitzer, author of The Female Persuasion
“A prose style as elegant and controlled as a swallow dive . . . No one could ever accuse Adderson of timidity when it comes to subject.”
—The Independent
“Arresting . . . [Adderson] writes with a rare understanding of human frailty.”
—The Times (London)
“Adderson excels at portraying life in all its glorious, devastating, unpredictable messiness.”
—Toronto Star
“Adderson achieves a remarkable effect with her prose. Its clarity is so overwhelming that it becomes intoxicating.”
—Globe and Mail
★ 2024-07-04
Stories by an accomplished Canadian writer about the complexity of loneliness and the sweet relief of connection.
In “Homing,” 62-year-old Marta leaves her husband, which is a “non-event” until she realizes how lonely she is, living in a new town and making feeble attempts to befriend her neighbors. Her despair starts to lighten when a flock of pigeons roosts in her shed; figuring out what’s brought them to her rental house forces her out of her shell. Taryn in “All Our Auld Acquaintances Are Gone” is adrift, a homeless addict. As she and a man who has promised to take her away—perhaps to recover—go from one fancy party to another on New Year’s Eve and steal from the guests, it would be easy to judge Taryn, except that the story swerves in a small, unexpected way. Adderson has a gift for finding the tender parts in characters, even unlikable ones. At 55, Ketman, the misanthropic grump in “The Procedure,” misses his late mother so much that he actually imagines she’s waiting just around the next corner of his colon, which he’s watching on screen during his colonoscopy. The best story here is “From the Archives of the Hospital for the Insane,” a piece about the power of women to care for each other, even under difficult circumstances. Drawing from research on British Columbia’s Provincial Hospital for the Insane in the early 20th century, Adderson teases out the social-historical reasons for women’s “insanity” as well as why some women might prefer to live in an institution rather than out in the world. Adderson, best known in the U.S. for her children’s books, is a deft, masterful storyteller whose literary fiction surely deserves more attention.
Confidently written stories by an author whose light touch suggests human pathos without pinning it down.
