Astra House – förlag

"Leaping, chattering, dancing atop this conundrum [of global migration] comes the hero of Celina Baljeet Basra's debut novel, Happy Singh Soni, his head bursting with ideas, his heart set on gargantuan dreams."-New York Times"Bighearted."-New York Times Book Review, Editor's Choice/Staff Pick Publishers Weekly Bookpage BooklistIn a rural village of Punjab, India, a moony young man crouches over his phone in a rapeseed field near his family's cabbage farm. His name is Happy Singh Soni, and he's watching YouTube clips of his favorite film, Bande a Part by Jean-Luc Godard. In fact, Happy is often compared to a young Sami Frey by the imaginary journalists that keep him company while he uses the outhouse. Pooing, as he says, "en plein air." When he's not sleeping among the cabbages and eating his mother's sugary rotis, Happy dreams of becoming an actor, one who plays the melancholy roles-sad, pretty boys, rare in Indian cinema. There are macho leads and funny boys en masse, but if you're looking for depth and vulnerability, you must make your own heroes.Then comes Wonderland, an eccentric facsimile of Disneyland that steadily buys up the local farms, rebranding the community's traditional way of life. Happy works a dead-end job at the amusement park, biding his time and saving money for a clandestine journey to Europe, where he'll finally land a breakout role. Little does he know that his immigration is being coordinated by a transnational crime syndicate. After a nightmarish passage to Italy, Happy still manages to find relief in food and fantasy, even as he is forced into ever-worsening work conditions over a debt he allegedly accrued in transit. But his daydreams grow increasingly at odds with his bleak reality, one shared by so many migrant workers disenfranchised by the systems that depend on their labor.At turns funny and poetic, sunny and tragic, Happy is a daring feat of postmodern literature, a polyphonic novel about the urgent, lovely coping mechanisms created by generations of diasporic people. Set against the enmeshed crises of global migration and the politics of labor within the food industry, Celina Baljeet Basra's luminous debut argues for the things that are essential to human survival: food, water, a place to lay one's head, but also pleasure, romance, art, and the inalienable right to a vivid inner life.

"Wondrous and weird." -New York Times"Gorgeous." -New Yorker"High Brow x Brilliant." -NY Mag (Approval Matrix)"So good it's hard to believe." -New York Times Book Review Podcast"Rare." -n+1"A true novel of the era." -Elle"Piercing, feverish, and frequently astonishing." -Entertainment Weekly"Utterly brilliant, shining, and mesmerizing." -Cosmopolitan"Freakish and hallucinatory." -Vulture"Absurdly funny." -Ms. Magazine"Savage." -Vanity Fair"Playful, immersive yet unreal." -Esquire"Riveting and innovative." -TIME"Curious, cerebral . . . with moments of tender poetry." -Times Literary Supplement"It."-SSENSE"Sophisticated." -Chicago Review of Books"Strange, haunting, and undeniably beautiful." -Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)"One of the most daring novels of the year." -Bookpage (Starred Review)"Humorously perverse." -Booklist"A fuck yes." -LitHub"Tailor-made for the present moment." -Kirkus Review"Witty, self-knowing and, extraordinarily, far beyond categorization." -The Times (UK)"A witty, worldly romp." -Philadelphia Inquirer"Surreal and stylish." -Debutiful"Highly literary." -Necessary Fiction"Eschewing labels, genres and, most certainly, expectations." -Shelf Awareness"Luxuriously indecipherable." -Tor.com"My definition of an unputdownable book . . . witty, astute, and self-aware."-Melissa Broder, author of Milk FedIt's as if her life only began once Moon appeared in it. The desultory copywriting work, the boyfriend, and the want of anything not-Moon quickly fall away when she beholds the idol in concert, where Moon dances as if his movements are creating their own gravitational field; on livestreams, as fans from around the world comment in dozens of languages; even on skincare products endorsed by the wildly popular Korean boyband, of which Moon is the youngest, most luminous member. Seized by ineffable desire, our unnamed narrator begins writing Y/N fanfic-in which you, the reader, insert [Your/Name] and play out an intimate relationship with the unattainable star.Then Moon suddenly retires, vanishing from the public eye. As Y/N flies from Berlin to Seoul to be with Moon, our narrator, too, journeys to Korea in search of the object of her love. An escalating series of mistranslations and misidentifications lands her at the headquarters of the Kafkaesque entertainment company that manages the boyband until, at a secret location, together with Moon at last, art and real life approach their final convergence.From a conspicuous new talent comes Y/N, a provocative literary debut about the universal longing for transcendence and the tragic struggle to assert one's singular story amidst the amnesiac effects of globalization. Crackling with the intellectual sensitivity of Elif Batuman and the sinewy absurdism of Thomas Pynchon, Esther Yi's prose unsettles the boundary between high and mass art, exploding our expectations of a novel about "identity" and offering in its place a sui generis picture of the loneliness that afflicts modern life.