Happiness TM - Softcover

Ferguson, Will

3.77

3,651 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1841952338 ISBN 13: 9781841952338

Publisher: Canongate Books, 2002

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Will this book help you give up smoking? Tell you how to lose those extra pounds? Help you attain inner peace, or improve your sex life? Nah. But it will answer the following questions ...Why would a cartel of drug, alcohol, tobacco and drug-rehab directors have a contract out on Edwin de Valu? (Edwin - the wiry, grey-suited, low-level editor at New York publisher Panderic Press). Why has rage disappeared from the roads and McDonalds gone all alfalfa? How come everyone seems so bloody happyTM? What does it have to do with an epic drunken encounter with Oliver Reed? And, most importantly, who, or what, is Tupac Soiree? When one of those irritating self-help books actually gets it right, then unnatural and worrying times are just around the corner. Here - in a brilliant parody of the lowest form of 'fadism' - Will Ferguson sets out a hysterical, thought-provoking image of a world where the mantra 'Live! Love! Learn!' is on everyone's (smiling) lips.

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Review:

"The Age of Nice is at hand, and there's nothing we can do about it." But the main protagonist of Will Ferguson's Happinesss terminally luckless book editor Edwin de Valu does want to do something. In fact, he feels obliged to put a stop to the Age of Nice, because it's all his fault. Desperate to save a flagging career in the world of self-help publishing, Edwin has staked everything on a dubious, thousand-page manuscript bearing the motto "Live! Love! Learn!" Promising its readers endless wealth, effortless weight loss and everlasting happiness, the book has become a runaway success. And that's where Edwin's problems really begin. Not just the murderous cartel of drug and tobacco barons who want Edwin's head on a plate. Also the fact that misery, cynicism, irrational hatred, draught beer--all the things that once made Edwin's life as an underdog bearable--have become outlawed. It's down to one man to save the globe from the tyranny of the Group Hug. But can Edwin do it, before the world economy melts down and a bestselling serial killer called Dr Ethics enacts his own deadly revenge?

It has been said--possibly by the sort of homily-peddling guru that Ferguson attacks so masterfully in his debut novel--that there are many routes to happiness. The general effect of reading this razor-sharp satire on the self-help industry is to understand that these routes lead us nowhere, except perhaps to a cul-de-sac called Hell. This would be depressing to realise, except that Happiness clubs its readers into submission with the sort of zany, almost other-worldly wit that makes us profoundly glad to be alive. --Matthew Baylis

Review:

A gleeful satire of the self-help industry. -- Jonathan Coe

A mean, wonderful, hilarious rant, both poisenously funny satire and dead-on indictment. The nature of true evil exposed. -- Anthony Bourdain

Happiness is a wonderfully assured, gleefully twisted and deeply irreligious satire which manages to be as moving as it is funny. -- Independent on Sunday

Hilarious. Ferguson takes no prisoners: Happiness TM is a caustic and outrageously funny send-up of society's foibles. -- W.P.Kinsella

Will Ferguson is a very gifted writer. -- Bill Bryson

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