Exceptional short stories featuring young millennial women, blending dark fantasy and quasi-horror with humour and intellectual dash

Announcing the arrival of a major talent, I HOPE YOU'RE HAPPY is more a warning than a wish.

Photos of women eating go viral, a cookie communicates a threat, and women working dead-end jobs become entangled in the performances around them. Everyday experiences of friendship, family, dating and desire catapult the reader into a creepy vortex of horror. Characters reveal themselves in slippery glimpses, through positive affirmations, social media accounts and secret appetites.

With this collection of haunting and haunted stories, Marni Appleton immerses us in a world of fleeting encounters, empty couplings, break ups, bust ups, threesomes and ghosts, giving us a kaleidoscopic overview of twenty-first century life.

'These beautifully written, female-focused stories stayed with me long past closing the cover. Sensual, alive and haunting. Dark wisps of womanhood.' Lucy Prebble, Executive Producer and writer on the Bafta, Golden Globe and Emmy award-winning HBO drama Succession

'This collection of wry and incisive stories explores navigating the sticky, glorious and more-often-than-not absolutely horrific terrain of late girlhood and early womanhood.' Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi, author of The Centre

'Truthful, dark, and walking the line between delicious and disturbing, I HOPE YOU'RE HAPPY is a rich and haunting read. Savour or gorge, this is a very special collection of deceptively cutting stories.' Lottie Hazell, author of Piglet

'Smart, surprising, and witty, these stories are a joy to read.' Naomi Booth, author of Animals at Night

'These tense stories of the zeitgeist show how the conditions of late capitalism promise women freedom while keeping them trapped in their economic and social circumstances. Clever, convincing and wry, they bowled me over. Like Mary Gaitskill and Miranda July before her, Marni Appleton writes about how it is to live now.' Julia Bell, author of Hymnaland Radical Attention

'Marni Appleton writes with insight, honesty and inventiveness into the raw, brutal spaces of girlhood and early womanhood. A powerful, political collection that maps intimately the minds and bodies of its characters, these stories stayed with me long after I'd finished.' Fran Littlewood, author of Amazing Grace Adams

'Such a wonderful collection, the writing so sharp, witty, dark, carefully observed and full of the realities of present day life.' Gerard Woodward, author ofLegolandandI'll Go to Bed at Noon

'Raw, fluid, intimate and believable.' Mariel Franklin, author of Bonding

'Deliciously dark, incisive and original, Marni Appleton has clearly mastered the short story, but more than that, she has mastered the art of winding her readers in ribbons of mess and mundanity that make up both fantastical and real life in a truly compelling collection.' Ore Agbaje-Williams, author of The Three of Us

'Glittering behind every fixed-on smile in this collection is a crystallised seam of horror. An illegally acquired cocktail of weirdness, body laughs, love and spite. I could not have liked it more.' Ben Pester, author of Am I in the Right Place?

'Tender, skewed and affecting stories told with a keen eye for the absurd and unsettling nature of being alive. A bewitching and twisted kaleidoscope of stories.' Isy Suttie, award-winning comedian and writer

'Appleton knows all the ways that women are seen, surveilled, and regarded. These excellent stories stare right back, and they brim over with insight and sharp intelligence.' Manuel Muoz, author ofThe Consequences

'Marni Appleton's debut collection of short stories is like a shot fired across the bow of contemporary feminism. Prophetic and profound at once, her stories are oblique glimpses of girls' and womens' lives in the age of Instagram, anxiety and heightened scrutiny of women and especially of their bodies. Fresh, surprising and invigorating, Appleton's stories resonate long after finishing them with a restless energy and a humane heart.' Jean McNeil, author ofDay for Night: A Novel