An American wildlife specialist and a Ghanaian psychologist cross paths in a wintry London. This is a story of two very lonely people thrown together by circumstance who set out to build a relationship with each other and others. It is a story of friendship, love, caring and how the smallest of kindnesses can create happiness. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and it is certainly one that will stay with me for a while.

I received an ARC of this book from Netgalley.

"He looked over the balustrade in both directions and forgot the cold. This view: the eye, the sinuous curve of the river, the Houses of Parliament lit with gold, and on the opposite side amid the dense constellations of lights, St Paul's and the behemoth towers of the city."
I've enjoyed Forna's work (especially The Memory of Love) so was really delighted this was an ARC. She creates characters that I want to know, as well as wanting to know what choices they will make. Here, Jean is working in London studying urban foxes, with the help of an unofficial network of workers in unsocial hours jobs who see more of the hidden London in the hours everyone else sleeps.
"She liked to watch those movies. The Day after Tomorrow, less so Mad Max and Waterworld. the Road, Planet of the Apes. Especially Planet of the Apes. The films were a form of penance for what humans had done, had you cheering for the apes and against the humans, not so much failing the Darwin test as screwing up the paper and lobbing it into the trash can."
She remembers her time working on a similar project in North America, tracking coyotes who had made towns their home. Attila is just visiting London, but he remembers studying in the city decades before, as he meets colleagues prior to a keynote speech on PTSD.
These are quite loose threads at the start of the book, and I put it down and got distracted by shiny new ones. When I picked it up, the book made more sense to me, perhaps because I had just read Jenny Erpenbeck. Forna isn't writing about refugees, but there are very similar themes here about why animals and people (have to) move, the choices that are not necessarily choices, and the need to keep asking the difficult questions, rather than generalising about experiences -Forna's acknowledgements include Resilience. In choosing a character who is an expert worker in warzones she also calls on her knowledge of Sierra Leone and the former Yugoslavia, as shown in her earlier writing.
I liked this book a great deal.
"He wondered if one day every feeling in the world would be identified, catalogued and marked for eradication. Was there no human experience that did not merit treatment now?"

A little bit slow for me but very, very lovely. Thanks to the publisher for the review copy!

I just adored this book. It spoke to me on so many levels and I didn't want it to end. But end is inevitable, so as it was drawing to its conclusion I found myself instead wishing I could sit down and have a chat with... the author? ... maybe the character, Attila? I'm not fussy - either would do!

One evening, crossing Waterloo Bridge in London, Jean runs into Attila. Literally, ending up on the ground. She is a divorced American wildlife biologist, living in London while she conducts a study of urban foxes. He is a widowed eminent psychiatrist, from Ghana but educated in the UK, in the city to present the keynote address at a conference the following week. While waiting for the conference, Attila wants to catch up with his niece and spend some time with his friend who suffers from early-onset dementia.

In the following days, Attila and Jean encounter each other again. Coincidence? Not so, according to Jean, the scientist, who cleverly explains the causality. So when Attila's niece is admitted to hospital with diabetes complications, and her young son Tano runs away from temporary foster care, Jean is there to lend a hand. Between them they are able to conscript a group of searchers from the Ghanaian, Nigerian and Sierra Leonean communities - plus one silver-painted living statue - to search for the boy. Initially I thought this search was going to be the main thread of the story, but in fact it's just one of a number of events that take place over the course of the week to keep Jean and Attila within each others' orbits, and to show us a thing or two about connectedness.

This is a story about many things; coincidence, mental health, regret, wildlife conservation, hope, family, dealing with the past, migration, trauma, happiness, death and of course, love.

By the time Attila is due to speak at the conference, both he and Jean have had a glimpse of the possibility of happiness together. I loved the way Jean made sense of it to herself:

Love is a gamble, the stake is the human heart. The lover holds his or her cards close, lays them out one at a time and watches each move of the other player. To whom do you go first? This is the ‘tell’ of love. When a thing happens, be it good or bad, when you pick up the telephone or push through a crowd, who is it you most want to reach? More than anybody else Jean wanted Attila.

My first 5-star read of 2018, and this is one I'll be adding to my Favorites shelf.

“You know how it is with white people. You say it’s race, they tell you you are mistaken. Then they say it’s because of your race when you say it is not.”

So says one of the characters in Happiness. So it is with great caution that I, from my white middle-class perspective, offer my thoughts on this wonderful book about ... race.

Admittedly, it covers a million things besides - the core of happiness, the effect of trauma, dementia, grief: for those that have died, for those that have changed, for relationships that change, small pleasures, passing moments. But behind it all is race.

Happiness follows two main characters from the moment they collide on Waterloo Bridge. Internationally-renowned Ghanaian psychiatrist, Attila, is in town to deliver a keynote on his area of expertise: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, while American scientist Jean has been commissioned by Southwark council to study the urban fox population. Both characters bring to life a hidden London some of us only ever brush up against.

Through Jean’s focussed and compassionate environmentalism we see the nesting colony of green parakeets in a dead tree, the foxes making dens in abandoned containers, the birds that can be enticed to the most urban of rooftops. Through Attila’s open and intimate international perspective we see the culture brought to London from all over the world, but mostly from the diaspora of a multitude of African nations. It’s mainly shown through food: Attila eats like a king in places many Londoners may walk straight past. He favours tips for restaurants that specialise in individual cuisines, but then is introduced to a place where they all come together:

“The clientele were men mostly. Some looked north African, others from the Horn of Africa, a couple of well-dressed Malians in suits and slim loafers, a Nigerian fellow with tribal marks. A young woman in business clothes sat alone and read a newspaper … A buffet of dishes was kept warm under hot lights. Four kinds of rice: broken, basmati, beans and rice, country. Couscous, too. Chickpea porridge, fufu, cassava boiled and pounded, yams, plantain, steamed and fried. Mealie meal. There was a stew of eggs and coriander Attila had once tasted in Eritrea. Different kinds of plasas, okra, potato leaves and cassava leaves. Emmanuel grinned. ‘Nigerians,’ he said. ‘But they bring in cooks from all over.’”

The link I’m cautious to make, is the parallel between the those two hidden worlds: London’s wildlife and London’s immigrant communities. “Churchgoers dressed in their best, men and women in colours and fabrics created for a faraway sun, floating like mid-winter butterflies...”

Before studying foxes, Jean tracked Coyotes in her home town of Greenhampton, Massachusetts. “They knew that at night coyote walked the streets of Greenhampton. They knew that the animals crossed lawns, circled darkened houses. They knew that some coyote returned to the hills while others slid from view when the first house lights went on. By the time people were running their car engines the coyotes had slipped beneath the surface of the day, below the floorboards of abandoned buildings, in the garden sheds, to their dens in empty plots and the edges of parking lots. In towns and cities across the country, coyotes lived side by side with men, though only the coyotes knew it.”

In the main storyline of Happiness, a child goes missing and Jean and Attila call on their networks of friends to help find him. The team is made up of street sweepers, traffic wardens, door-men, security guards. A community of immigrants who own London by night. Do they, too, then ‘slip beneath the surface of the day?’ It’s certainly true that they live side by side with white London, as though invisible. Hidden in plain sight. Symbolically, one of the crew of helpers is a living statue from the southbank, complete with silver body makeup. To the average London resident he’s as good as invisible as an individual, but Jean and Attila see the man - Osman - beneath the skin colour, even if that skin colour is silver.

As the book progresses one errant fox is accused of hurting a child. Jean becomes the lone voice standing up against a public outcry. As a guest on a talk radio show she is ridiculed, and her facts and statistics dismissed, as calls rise for sterilisation, or a cull of all foxes. It’s not a long leap to imagine the same phone-in guests demanding immigration controls. They share a determination to see the unfamiliar as threatening. When reading details of a hunted coyote towards the end of the novel, the action hits with a gut-wrenching power. No parallel is explicitly drawn, but I can’t help think it’s so emotional because it represents a lynching.

But perhaps my mind is racing too far. What is certainly true, is that Jean and Attila both really see what and who is right in front of them, and they appreciate and engage without judgement.

As I mentioned, there are a million things besides in this novel. It is a complex woven tapestry of ideas and information. At times the many strands seem to fly off in too many directions, but it is worth the patience it takes to pull the threads together. The characters are wonderful and it is full of fascinating insights: I loved learning about the teams that manage war zones and Jean’s vision of the order in which a deserted London would return the wild.

And as the title suggests, there is much philosophising on the key to happiness. The answer? Maybe food, music, dancing, expecting the worst and surviving it, breaking down fake constructs, but mostly people. The communities of immigrants that hold London together, ready to help, existing side by side with their neighbours, in the light of day. It is perhaps no surprise that Osman feeds a stray fox. And that Komba, a former child soldier from Sierra Leone, has no trouble spotting a grey seal as it bobs its head above the water of the Thames.

I was sure I would adore this book - and I enjoyed plenty of it, but parts left me bored and slightly confused. This is a story of chance and coincidence, of strangers meeting and lives slowly changing - and I loved that aspect of it. But it is also a book about animals in urban places - and that I was not so keen on.

Aminatta Forna tells her story slowly and considerately. I had the impression that every word, every sentence was placed very thoughtfully and carefully. While I can appreciate her craft, I also found it lifeless. Her prose was just not quite sharp enough for me to excuse the rambling nature of her narrative. While it is certainly accomplished, for me something was lacking. And I cannot quite put my fingers on what exactly the missing ingredient was - but as it is found the overall book less compelling than its many parts.

Part of that has to do with the fact that I found her two protagonists, Attila the psychologist and Jean the biologist, more compelling when they weren't interacting with each other. I thought Jean's struggle as a researcher who is missing her son was compelling and interesting (and very close to my heart); Attila's restlessness and his interesting profession as somebody working with trauma was another highpoint for me - but for some reason I did not find them believable together and I thought their interactions did not ring true to what their characters were on their own (this might very well have been on purpose, I know, showing that they bring out the best in each other but it didn't really work for me).

There were definite glimpses of brilliance here though. Jean's interactions with her extended network of rubbish men and security and everybody else walking the streets were wonderful and lovely and absolutely felt true. Her conversations with her son were painful to read but poignant. Attila's love for his wife was wonderfully drawn and the juxtaposition with his restlessness was incredibly well done. But this brilliance was not quite enough for me to off-set the pages and pages of musings on coyotes and foxes and their changing habitats;a topic that I am very much not interested in at all and that Forna did not manage to make interesting.

It's funny that a animal we call a pest to our waste disposal could bring two people for an epic journey. We meet Jean who records the habits of foxes in the urban jungle of London. In her discovery on how these wild animals survive she encountered a psychiatrist Attila, who finds out a relative is missing. As their journey begins together, eye-opening accounts to the struggles of multicultural cohabitation emerge.

The beginning part of the book was hard to get into as the story evolves nonetheless I'm glad I continued reading the story progressed, forming a well structured story. Towards the end I felt I was part of the story hoping that in a way, everyone would find their own happiness- whether it was in a form of a garden, family or just seeing the happiness of others.

The author Aminatta Forna delivers an interesting portrayal of society today, making me question how we look onto society's issues or even how we handle them. At the end of this book I was pondering about my own certain happiness. A lovely, yet eye-opening read!

4★
“‘Fast food. Fried chicken, burgers, kebabs – the sidewalks have turned into an “all you can eat” buffet for foxes. The same is true in cities the world over.”

Jean has a small grant to study urban foxes in London and supplements it with money earned from “wilding” people’s urban domains, planting vegetable and wildflower gardens on balconies and rooftops. Her business card reads “Jean Turane. Wild Spaces.”

She’s a divorced American with an ex-husband, Ray, a perfectly decent fellow who absolutely loves the cars he sells and the life he’s chosen in a small town. Jean, on the other hand, is an outdoor girl who goes for runs through the woods and puts radio-collars on coyotes. He does go along to help and tries to sound interested, but isn’t completely convincing.

“Ray felt he could not compete with her work. If she had run her own nail salon probably they would still be together.”

That’s the life a lot of her old schoolmates chose, but she’s enjoying her solitude in London, where she watches foxes clamber along walls, across bridges, through alleys, making dens under shipping containers. Some are chased away, some are fed by people working in the kitchens of the Savoy.

Crossing Waterloo Bridge one day, she literally bumps into Attila Asare, an enormous, very black African psychiatrist who is in London as the keynote speaker at a psychiatry conference. They mumble apologies and go on their way. They cross paths again, of course, and the connection of their stories is the basis for the novel.

Forna is a fine writer and she obviously has a lot to say about urbanisation of wildlife, conservation, politics, wars and war zones, migrants, psychology - anything I’ve left out?

Jean is a bit of an idealistic tree-hugger, Attila is a realistic, practical psychiatrist, and when they are suddenly presented with a young boy who needs looking after, they gather some of the African community around them and pitch in.

There’s a bit too much going on, but basically I enjoyed it. I was reminded of Trevor Noah’s autobiography, Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood, when Attila was asked about his name.

‘Your parents named you after Attila the Hun?’
Attila smiled. ‘Some people,’ he said, ‘name their baby girls Victoria.’

Noah said many Africans had only heard famous names and decided to name their kids for someone famous, and one kid he grew up with was called Hitler. As Noah said, the parents would have had no idea Hitler was bad, just that it was a name they’d heard a lot. [I shared a lot of his information about this in my review of his book: ]

There are many side stories, mostly Attila’s I think, since he’s got the colourful background, working around the world as he has with troops and people suffering from PTSD. He is continually asked to be an expert witness in stress and trauma cases, but he prefers not to testify, since there’s too much at stake now financially, not medically.

“‘It’s a hot topic and it’s only getting hotter. The military take it a great deal more seriously these days. Then there’s the insurance companies, certain employers. There’s a lot of work for expert witnesses now.’”

He’s an expert, all right, but he understands that not all reactions to grief and tragedy are necessarily PTSD. So there is quite a discussion about what does constitute PTSD as opposed to normal reactions to loss or horror, and if I need a psychiatrist, I’d like Attila to be mine, please.

He has suffered his own trauma and losses, and the stories cut back and forth a bit to his work in war zones, facing checkpoints and his unwinding with an iPod playing something like a Congolese rumba, which gets him dancing with abandon in his hotel room. Seems to suit him.

Jean’s stories tend to get preachy about cutting down trees, killing foxes and coyotes, eating vegan, running through the cemetery to be alone. A bit of a killjoy, but gradually we see her warm up with the influence of the migrant community, Attila and the boy.

A good read, if a bit disjointed, and I loved Attila. Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the review copy from which I’ve quoted, so quotes may have changed.

What do wolves, foxes and immigrants have in common?
In this multi-faceted epic novel about the battle for survival on the margins of society, the author explores issues of tolerance and co-existence against a background of violent culture clashes and territorial disputes around the world. The two main characters are well fleshed out with convincing back stories and Forna is careful to prevent political posturing or polemic from overwhelming the narration.

I was initially drawn to the book by the cover- and then, the title. 'Happiness'. How can anyone define that,since most of us are not in a state of happiness all of the time.
This book meandered between two main characters with a supporting cast of other people who all have moved to London for different reasons.
.Jean is a biologist from the USA, living alone and carrying out a study into the Urban fox population. in London Attila is a psychiatrist-an expert in his field- who comes to the UK for a conference. where he will be the keynote speaker.
Both seem comfortable in their own bubbles-both rather solitary.
Over time, the characters meet and begin to interact and Jean helps Attila with a difficult situation when his nephew goes missing.
Slowly, we begin to see the backstory that both characters are living with and how it has affected them individually. They are both living with losses of some kind- but they have carried on functioning in their every day lives.
I loved the way flashbacks- about tracking animals (in the case of Jean) and war zones (in the case of Attila) helped the story to develop and grow.
I grew to love this book and the characters in it and wholeheartedly recommend it.

A beautiful exploration of the human condition. ‘Happiness’ is most certainly wonderfully descriptive and the evocation of both character and setting is a true marvel. Yes, a more tightly edited text would have even more impact- as at times pace is lacking- but the reader cannot help but invest in this immersive, epic novel.

Aminatta Forna doesn’t just write stories to captivate us for a few hours, she challenges us to think about our homogeneity with the world and how we share this world with other living things. She invites us to consider our relationships with others, both at a personal and societal level. Should everything that exists have a simple slap-on label? Dogs good! Foxes bad! Bad destroy !!

Jean, is an urban wildlife biologist, studying wildlife-human coexistence. Several times she accidentally bumps into Atilla, an internationally recognised conflict resolution psychologist, in London for a conference. Needless to say, there is a smouldering love story taking place and it is tantalisingly developed throughout the book. “There is a time one sees a new love, a person who might perhaps become a new love, when the possibility of love has been spoken for the first time, but the possibility of retreat still exists. … A false word or misstep and all might yet be undone. Beneath the possibility of joy lies the fear of shame.”

Atilla is convinced to take on a case of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and we get an insight into the diagnosis considerations and again how we attempt to pigeon-hole everything. He presents us with a belief that mankind is naturally drawn to violent conflict and what are the trigger points for real or perceived grief, anger or threats. Atilla is resolving family and friends issues, where his ‘friend’ Rose is living with dementia in a nursing home and her carer has been sacked. He also needs to track down his niece’s son who is living on the streets after immigration has detained his mother. The two areas of immigration and dementia are very sensitively and subtly provoked and explored.

Aminatta has a very intelligent and poetic writing style that is a joy to read. She touches on so many different areas where her observational and descriptive skills are amazing. Using simple gestures and phrasing to illustrate and invoke much deeper motivations and intent. The concise nature of her writing enables us to explicate the scene in our minds and keeps a good pace to the story. The story is simply a powerhouse of modern day issues and observations.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Bloomsbury Publishing UK, for an ARC version of the book in return for an honest review.

You could accuse Forna of over-reliance on "coincidence" to drive her plot forward. But one of her characters attempts to cover that off for us:

"So … you say it is a coincidence we have met three times. What if I tell you I don’t believe in coincidences? … But what we call coincidences are merely normal events of low probability."

Fundamentally, her character is explaining that if you join the dots leading up to an event, you will see that what might look like a random meeting is, in fact, almost inevitable. You might think it unlikely that two strangers would meet three times in one of the world’s busiest cities (London), but when you learn about what brings them to London, it becomes less surprising that they should, in this case literally, run into one another.

Attila is a Ghanaian psychiatrist in London to give a keynote speech at a conference on his specialist topic - post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Jean is a scientist in London to study urban foxes. They first meet when Jean is out for a run in the city and accidentally collides with Attila. They dust themselves off and go their separate ways. But a connection has been made and grows from there.

Both our main protagonists have a lot going on in their lives. I had to stop at one point and write down all the different story threads so that I could try to keep track of them. Attila is in London for professional reasons (the conference), but also personal: he is trying to contact Ama, the daughter of friends, who has dropped out of contact. Whilst preparing for his conference and searching for Ama, he is also visiting Rosie, an ex-colleague now in a nursing home. And he also takes on a new role as an expert witness in a case where the personnel involved bring back memories of his past. Jean is studying foxes, but she is also helping a client build a roof garden, dealing with an illegal fox hunt she comes across, defending foxes on the radio and re-building a relationship with her son, Luke.

The kinds of connections that Forna explores in her book are not those where all these story lines turn out to be connected. Attila deals with his plot lines, Jean deals with hers (of course, there is some cross over: Jean gets involved in the search for Ama, for example). But their developing friendship means that they learn to experience some of what the other is going through.

In the mix with these different story lines developing in the book’s present, Forna also takes time flesh out her two main characters by jumping back in time. Attila is grieving for his wife, Maryse, whom he lost some time ago. And we also hear about some of his experiences in war zones. Jean is dealing with the break up of her marriage and we learn about her study of coyotes in USA prior to the foxes in urban UK.

If all this sounds like a lot for just 320 pages, there’s an element of truth in that. Especially as there are also several side-characters with some, albeit less, character development.

It’s a book that starts out with coincidence or chance encounters. It develops (because there is no such thing as coincidence, remember) into a book about living together, coexistence. Attila and Jean have lessons to learn about this, although I am not going to say what happens to the relationship they have after three “chance encounters”. The solution to the coyote/fox problem is also about tolerance and finding a way to live together. The parakeet that adorns the cover of some editions is a sub-plot also about tolerance and coexistence.

By taking time to fill in the history of the two main characters, I think one of the things Forna is doing is saying we can’t deal with things superficially - where we are now is deeply rooted in where we have come from. I think this is similar to what Ali Smith is doing in her seasonal quartet (Autumn and Winter both take time to ground current events in a historical context) and what Richard Powers has very recently done in The Overstory which very much focuses on the connections that draw people together. Forna's story opens with a prologue in which a wolf hunter in the early part of the 19th century tracks down a wolf: ostensibly, this has nothing to do with what follows, but the link wolf-coyote-fox is there pointing us towards what the book is telling us about.

It’s a valid point. We easily take life a face value and are surprised by the twists and turns it presents us with. But perhaps we would be less surprised if we took a bit more time to understand the context, both our own history and that of those we interact with. The book is in part a plea for tolerance and understanding. Attila has a key view that the axiom “trauma = suffering = damage”, which drives his profession, is wrong. Yes, trauma brings suffering, but suffering does not necessarily equate to damage, he says. It can be what makes us (more) human. The book seems to me to be asking us not to try to heal everyone of every little bit of suffering they have endured, but to appreciate that some things can make us better people. Sometimes, perhaps, suffering does not mean damage as much as it means greater tolerance and understanding.

Writing this has slightly altered my view of this book. As I started writing, I wasn’t sure about the reliance on coincidence or about the sheer number of different plot lines that were being progressed. But, on reflection, they are perhaps a key strength of the book given what I understand its main motivations to be. I could be wrong (it wouldn’t be the first time), but this is certainly a book to dwell on after reading it which is always a positive.

My thanks to the publisher for a free review copy via NetGalley.

This is a story of serendipity. The chance meeting of two strangers on Waterloo bridge caused by a fox. What follows is a story that transcends time, culture, and what it is to be truely happy.

This is a complicated tale, with an uneasy structure. It travels backwards and forwards between places and people, meaning it can be difficult to commit and get deeply involved with all of the stories. I'm not a fan of this kind of story telling normally, as I'm easily confused and distracted by multiple side stories within an overall arc. However, there is a real depth of emotion written here, that resonates throughout the whole story. At its heart is a sad tale of two lonely people hoping to connect with someone at a time in their lives when they just need to feel a deeper connection to something. That's an overlying theme here, as we see a connection not only with other people, but also with something deeper and more primal.

Because of the added stories, the plot can sometimes be slow. However, I'm glad I persisted as this is wonderfully well written. Forna manages to capture the culturally rich life of London beautifully, and I found myself lapping up the colourful richness of it all. I loved getting a different perspective of capital life, that I haven't read anywhere else before.

I just wish this had been edited a bit more tightly, and some sidestories maybe trimmed down, because I did find them distracting, however much I loved the writing style.