The Happiness of Others

I was born in a house overrun with insistent, tattered ghosts from which there was no escape. At the time, we lived in the western part of a town where all the single-story houses were the same. My brother and I hoped that other people’s homes were as haunted as ours. When I was ten years old, I was forced to leave the village. But the ghosts just wouldn’t stay home.

Cloe has learned to communicate with shadows. She listens for voices that will take her back to her calamitous childhood with a mother unable to love her. Now a grown woman, whose past is marked by failure, Cloe has taken on a new identity in a new city. But her disastrous relationships are tainted by her obsessive search for answers. Guided by voices, memories and elusive guardians of her ten-year-old self, her lost baby brother, Professor T and The General, she harbors the eternal hope of finding truth beyond the ruins and redemption for a burden that was never hers to bear.