
Happy
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Neil Shah
About this listen
In 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 à 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. 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-rare in Indian cinema.
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. 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.
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.
©2023 Celina Baljeet Basra (P)2024 TantorRelated to this topic
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- By: George Orwell, Joe White - adaptation
- Narrated by: Andrew Garfield, Cynthia Erivo, Andrew Scott, and others
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Overall
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- By wotsallthisthen on 04-07-24
By: George Orwell, and others
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- By: Sun Tzu
- Narrated by: Aidan Gillen
- Length: 1 hr and 7 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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- By Nemo71 on 12-31-19
By: Sun Tzu
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- A Short Story
- By: Fredrik Backman, Elizabeth DeNoma - translator
- Narrated by: Stacy Gonzalez
- Length: 1 hr and 49 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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By: Fredrik Backman, and others
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- Narrated by: Anna Skellern
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Overall
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Performance
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