The Happiness Code

Her acclaimed story collection, At the Sign of the Naked Waiter, showcased Amy Herrick's gift for language, exuberant humor, and boundless imagination. In her charming debut novel, The Happiness Code, that gift has come to fruition. "A few days or a few years" into the future, an ordinary Brooklyn family is going about the business of living. Pinky longs for a second child, but her husband, Arthur, broods unceasingly about the sorrows of the planet and feels it needs fewer people on board, not more. They are both seeking happiness in their own way-as are the novel's other indelibly drawn characters, from catastrophe-minded seven-year-old Teddy and Oedipus the family cat to Pinky's abrasive forensic psychologist friend, Fran. It is the discovery of a perfectly happy abandoned baby in their garden, and then his disappearance, that changes all their lives. The Happiness Codeis at once a romance, a mystery, and a fairy tale-laced with hard questions about destiny and its new challenger, biotechnology.

Amy Herrick, author of At the Sign of the Naked Waiter, is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her fiction has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, TriQuarterly, and Prize Stories 1992: The O. Henry Awards.