It’s obvious from the first page that Joan Silber is a writer in complete control of her craft. This is a multi-perspective novel corralling the ways in which different characters find what happiness they can in the chaos of life.

There are seven chapters from six characters, with Ethan, a gay lawyer living in New York, bookending the narrative. All chapters are written in the first person and detail a character’s potted life history: explaining how they come to be where they are and how they find their own peace. Each character is linked to another – some closely, others more tangentially.

Ethan begins his story with an exploding bomb: his father has a secret second family. His father – a ‘happy capitalist exploiter’ – has a Thai ‘minor wife’ and two sons. All live close by. The disclosure leads Ethan’s mother to spend 12 months in Thailand for herself. There’s no happy Hollywood-style resolution and this trend is perpetuated throughout other chapters.

The characters come to the page so fully formed that it feels as if we’re sitting with familiar friends discussing life. There are clever, amusing asides which give us the impression of being let into a secret.

The characters’ happiness is not a series of happily-ever-after mountains of ecstasy, but smaller hills of joy. Siblings find solace in each other and lingering family secrets are put to bed. Old scars heal over, enmities resolve, poor early lives are redeemed and compromises accepted. Silber’s global reach is in evidence. Stories have homes in New York, London, Thailand, Cambodia and Tibet. The choice of these places is no accident. Silber compares the differences in concepts of happiness between Western capitalist exceptionalism and Eastern philosophy. Truly masterful writing.

Reviewed by Bob Moore