I Married You For Happiness

By Lily Tuck

A riveting and deeply moving portrait of love and marriage.

“His hand is growing cold, still she holds it.”

The story unfolds over a single night, as Nina sits at the bedside of her husband Philip, whose sudden and unexpected death is the reason for her lonely vigil. Too shocked yet to grieve, she recalls the defining moments of their long marriage, beginning with their first meeting in Paris. As the reader is drawn through select memories – real and imagined – of events that occurred in places as distant and disparate as France, Wisconsin, Hong Kong, Mexico, and California, Tuck reveals the intimacies, dark secrets and overwhelming joys that shaped the lives of Nina and Philip.

Moving, powerful, and utterly engaging, ‘I Married You for Happiness’ is a riveting portrait of a forty-three-year-old marriage, an elegant elegy to a husband and a meditation on how chance can affect both a life and love.

Author: Lily Tuck
Format: Hardback
Release Date: 19 Jan 2012
Pages: 208
ISBN: 978-0-00-744914-9
Lily Tuck was born in Paris and is the author of four previous novels – Interviewing Matisse, The Woman Who Walked on Water, the PEN/Faulkner award finalist Siam and The News From Paraguay, which won the National Book Award – as well as a collection of stories, Limbo, and Other Places I Have Lived. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker and the Paris Review. She lives in New York City.

Praise for ‘I Married You For Happiness’: -

”'Captivating . . . Absorbing… You also won’t un-read this odd little book once you’ve finished it. It will make you chafe. It will strike a chord.” - Marie Arana, The Washington Post

”'In mourning, the only comfort of science is to assert the uncertainty of all that appears real. And perhaps that is what this slight, plangent novel is telling us: that character is unreadable, that memory is perilous.” - Colin Thubron, NYT

”'This slim brush of a book manages to accomplish in a mere 200-plus pages what many novelists try to do in twice the verbiage. . . . Examines the disguises and surprises that energize a lasting marriage.'” - Ellen Emry Heltzel, The Seattle Times

”'A magical, truthful tale.'” - Huffington Post

”'This novel is an elegant vigil… a poised, readable, immediate novel” - Kate Kellaway, Observer