Adelaide Faith’s debut novel Happiness Forever arrives like an awkward confession between friends—raw, uncomfortable, and utterly compelling. Set in a seaside town that feels both timeless and achingly familiar, the story follows Sylvie, a veterinary nurse who has discovered something terrifying and wonderful: she’s in love with her therapist.
This isn’t a mere crush or a passing fancy. Sylvie has calculated that she thinks about her therapist “roughly six hundred times a day”—a figure she later downplays to “maybe four hundred” in an attempt to appear slightly less unhinged. Her sessions with the therapist are the only moments when life feels bearable, when color seems to exist in a world that otherwise presents itself in shades of grey.
The Architecture of Longing
Faith demonstrates remarkable control over her narrative voice, channeling Sylvie’s desperate internal monologue with precision that never feels overwrought despite the intensity of the subject matter. The prose style echoes the therapist’s own measured approach—sentences carefully constructed, pauses precisely placed, everything held at just the right angle to catch the light.
What makes Happiness Forever particularly successful is Adelaide Faith’s ability to balance the comic and the tragic. Sylvie’s obsession is simultaneously laugh-inducing and heartbreaking. When she considers elaborate schemes to get the therapist to hug her—including changing her name, moving countries, and altering her physical appearance—we recognize the absurdity while understanding the profound loneliness that drives such fantasies.
The author’s background as a veterinary nurse at Battersea Dogs & Cats Home clearly informs the novel’s secondary setting. The veterinary clinic scenes possess an authenticity that grounds the more ethereal therapy sequences. Sylvie’s work life provides a counterpoint to her emotional turbulence—here is a place where she knows exactly what to do, where her competence is unquestionable, where love takes the simple form of caring for wounded animals.
Transference and Truth
The central relationship between Sylvie and her therapist operates on multiple levels. On the surface, it’s a straightforward case of what the therapist terms “erotic transference.” But Faith digs deeper, exploring how Sylvie’s attachment represents both a profound longing for connection and a sophisticated defense mechanism against real intimacy.
The therapist herself remains somewhat enigmatic throughout—as she must, given her professional role—but Faith provides just enough detail to make her feel real. Her careful smiles, her cream cardigans, her measured responses all contribute to the portrait of someone who has learned to hold space for others’ pain without getting lost in it herself.
Faith’s treatment of therapy as a practice is notably nuanced. The novel neither dismisses therapy as ineffective nor presents it as a magical cure. Instead, it shows therapy as a complex human interaction, full of possibility and limitation, breakthrough and frustration.
The Supporting Cast: Friendship as Salvation
The introduction of Chloe, an art curator whom Sylvie meets on the beach, marks a significant turning point in the narrative. Their friendship develops with the same intensity that characterizes Sylvie’s attachment to her therapist, but without the inherent power imbalance that makes the latter relationship untenable.
Chloe’s presence allows Faith to explore healthier forms of connection. Their conversations about art, obsession, and the difference between fantasy and reality provide some of the novel’s most insightful moments. Faith wisely avoids making Chloe a mere substitute for the therapist; instead, she represents a different kind of relationship—one based on mutual attraction and genuine reciprocity.
The character of Curtains, Sylvie’s brain-damaged dog, serves multiple narrative functions. Beyond providing comic relief and demonstrating Sylvie’s capacity for care, Curtains becomes a vessel for Sylvie’s complicated relationship with mortality—she sometimes believes her deceased father inhabits the dog, adding another layer to the novel’s exploration of attachment and loss.
Style and Structure: Precision in Service of Feeling
Faith’s prose style deserves particular attention. She writes with a deceptive simplicity that belies the emotional complexity of her subject matter. The chapters are short, focused, each one building toward the inevitable rupture of Sylvie’s primary attachment.
The author makes interesting formal choices, particularly in how she handles dialogue. Therapy sessions unfold with theatrical precision, while Sylvie’s internal monologue flows with stream-of-consciousness intensity. This contrast effectively illustrates the gap between social performance and private feeling.
The novel’s structure mirrors its central theme: each chapter builds expectation, provides temporary satisfaction, then returns to a state of longing. This rhythm perfectly captures the addictive quality of Sylvie’s relationship with therapy.
Cultural Context and Broader Themes
Happiness Forever by Adelaide Faith arrives at a moment when discussions about therapy culture, attachment styles, and the commodification of emotional care feel particularly urgent. Faith neither condemns nor celebrates the therapeutic relationship; instead, she examines it as a space where the most fundamental human needs—to be seen, understood, and valued—play out under artificial constraints.
The novel also functions as a portrait of female friendship, exploring how women support each other through romantic disappointment and existential crisis. Sylvie and Chloe’s relationship provides a template for the kind of connection Sylvie seeks but cannot find within the therapeutic framework.
Faith’s treatment of mental health avoids both stigmatization and sentimentality. Sylvie’s struggles with depression, anxiety, and attachment are presented as facts of her existence rather than conditions to be overcome or celebrated.
Minor Imperfections in an Otherwise Stellar Debut
If there’s a weakness in Happiness Forever by Adelaide Faith, it lies in the occasional tendency toward whimsy that doesn’t quite land. Some of Sylvie’s more elaborate fantasies—particularly those involving magic and transformation—feel slightly at odds with the novel’s otherwise grounded approach.
Additionally, the pacing occasionally falters in the middle third, where some of Sylvie’s ruminations become slightly repetitive. However, this repetitiveness arguably serves to illustrate the cyclical nature of obsessive thought, so it may be less a flaw than a deliberate artistic choice.
The Final Sessions: Resolution Without Simple Answers
The novel’s conclusion demonstrates Faith’s commitment to emotional honesty over narrative tidiness. The end of Sylvie’s therapy doesn’t result in either complete devastation or sudden enlightenment. Instead, she finds herself in a liminal space—bereft but potentially free, forced to imagine new forms of connection.
The final scenes, which involve an attempted ritual and an accidental encounter, are both comic and poignant. Faith resists the temptation to provide easy answers about how Sylvie will move forward, instead leaving her—and us—with questions about the nature of love, attachment, and the possibility of genuine connection.
Conclusion: A Remarkable Achievement
Happiness Forever by Adelaide Faith is that rare debut that feels both entirely fresh and deeply familiar. Faith has crafted a novel that speaks directly to contemporary anxieties about connection, attachment, and the commodification of care while remaining grounded in particular, lived experience.
As Adelaide Faith’s first novel, Happiness Forever suggests a writer of considerable talent and empathy. Readers who enjoyed recent works of literary fiction exploring similar themes—such as Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill or The Friend by Sigrid Nunez—will find much to appreciate here.
The novel succeeds on multiple levels: as a psychological character study, as a meditation on modern therapeutic culture, and as a story about the various forms love can take when filtered through power dynamics and professional boundaries. It’s a book that stays with you, not because it provides answers, but because it so accurately captures the questions we all carry about connection, desire, and the possibility of being truly known by another person.
Adelaide Faith has announced herself as a significant new voice in contemporary fiction, one who understands that the most profound insights often emerge from the most ordinary circumstances—a therapy session, a friendship, a dog that won’t stop walking in circles. Happiness Forever may not be forever, but it definitely lingers long after the final page.