Some of the stories taper into obscurity as they journey into the horizon language is hallucinatory every once so often, poetry branches out behind prose. In this book, prose doesn’t quite behave like prose. You might as well put on funeral clothes before reading as happiness is indeed like water for these troubled women – snaking away through multiple exit doors between fingers, pooling in a different place each time which makes no promises. Nothing ends well in the life of these women burdened by religion, men, and cultural disposables, to pluck the low-hanging fruits. Happiness, Like Water, is a collection of short stories about different and differently flawed women for whom happiness hangs on the horizon, far from what the longest fishing line can reach. You haven’t? Oh well, let me give you my blessings. Have you wondered about prose that smuggles in social commentary, sniffs philosophy, commands poetry to pass the salt? Prose that reads like hands reading a texture of oiled skin, threatening a sugar crash. Happiness, Like Water is her debut fictional collection. Her story “America” was short-listed for the Caine Prize in African Writing. Happiness, Like Water heralds the arrival of a fearless and sensitive literary voice.Author’s Bio: Chinelo Okparanta is a Nigerian-American short story writer born in Port-Harcourt, Nigeria. Her closely observed characters populate stories that offer a clear-eyed view of an often traumatic family life, questioning the purpose of their time on earth, and whether there is a hereafter, or a different kind of afterlife altogether, outside of Port Harcourt.

In language that is both raw and elegant, Okparanta's stories are often told from the point of a view of a child - a little girl, an adult daughter.

High expectations - whether of success in Nigeria, or the dream of opportunity and accomplishment in America - consume them.

Here, we meet a childless couple with very different desires a college professor comforting a troubled student a mother seeking refuge from an abusive husband an embittered spinster recalling the loss of a dear childhood friend and a young woman waiting to join her lover abroad. In this debut collection, Chinelo Okparanta introduces us to families burdened equally by the past and the future.

Happiness like water