Jem Calder – författare

AN OBSERVER BEST DEBUT NOVELIST OF 2026'Prepare to see this everywhere.' Elle'I was totally invested.' Saba Sams'I was utterly enthralled.' Leslie Jamison 'Jem Calder is my new favourite writer.' Andrew O'Hagan'Will appeal to Cleopatra And Frankenstein fans, and the setting and themes is reminiscent of Evenings And Weekends.' StylistChuck and Joey meet in a bar. He's in his mid-thirties; she's twelve years younger. He's long abandoned his ambition of becoming a novelist and now works as a copywriter at a big ad agency. 'Lead copywriter,' he corrects himself. Joey lives paycheck to paycheck on her barista wages and privately dreams of making it as a poet. They go back to Chuck's luxury flat-a world away from Joey's cramped house-share, the crumbs in her bed. Soon, Joey's imagining a future between them, and Chuck's moving on from a mistake in his recent past. Amazing, how meeting a new person can make you feel so new.Funny, excruciating, and true, I Want You to Be Happy is a sharp-eyed tale of two people searching for meaning and connection in modern times, missing the mark maybe, but still trying.

'If you've been waiting for someone to close the gap on social distancing, to capture the furtive problems of social media, to make you laugh at your own alienation, to wrap your mind around the narcissism of small differences, then Calder is your new best friend, and his debut collection is the must-read book of the year.' Andrew O'HaganJulia has landed a fresh start as a chef at an up-and-coming city restaurant.Her ex-boyfriend, Nick, is flirting with sobriety and nobody else.Life should have started to take shape by now, but instead they're trying to make new versions of themselves, searching for a good answer to the question: 'What do you do?''An exhilarating and beautiful book by an extraordinarily gifted writer.' Sally Rooney 'Remarkably fresh . . . Calder's writing achieves that rare thing of capturing how it feels to be young.' Esquire