England, 1971. Harriet Bush is eight years old, cross-legged on her brother's bed, reading Swallows and Amazons and scratching at the wallpaper.

LOVE AND HAPPINESS follows Harriet across two decades; from a Congleton childhood through Stockport flat-shares, from the adoption papers that arrive on her sixteenth birthday to an extraordinary piece of engineering that will make her briefly notorious. She is Black, adopted, raised by a white family who love her fiercely and understand her imperfectly. Her brother Lucas is the only other person in the world who knows exactly what that means.

The novel is often very funny. A burglary mounted for the most romantic of reasons goes comprehensively, humiliatingly wrong. A London hen night escalates well beyond anyone's control. Then there is Dennis, in the flat below; a retired RAF veteran with a half-finished model P-38 Lightning on his craft bench and increasingly unreliable hands.

Underneath the comedy, LOVE AND HAPPINESS; named for the Al Green and Teenie Hodges lyric that opens it; is a novel about what it means to hold on to the people you might lose. Harriet's Britain is the specific, unromantic, entirely real Britain of the 1970s and 1980s: the pointed reading lists of a well-meaning English teacher, a social worker arriving unannounced at a maternity ward, a tabloid front page, a wet afternoon in a Worsley cemetery. The novel holds you inside Harriet's world as though it's happening now; clearly and without self-pity; through eyes that see sharper than most.

The last line of the novel belongs to Dennis. Five words. They are, in context, completely unbearable.

"A compelling force of nature that kept me turning the pages."

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