SOMETHING LIKE HAPPY by EVA WOODS

Annie is sleepwalking through life. After a series of tragedies upend her marriage and destroy the perfect life she had built for herself, Annie doesn’t believe her heart can be broken any further. Now she’s a 30- something living in a run-down apartment with a roommate, working a boring 9-to-5 job, and looking after her hospital-ridden mother.

She’s lost touch with her friends and isn’t interested in finding new people to care about. But Annie is okay with that and has resigned herself to a life of solitary binge-watching—after all, if you’ve already lost everything, you don’t have anything left to lose, right? But when she meets Polly—an impossibly cheerful and optimistic cancer patient—Annie’s worldview is turned on its head. From her colorful outfits to her bottomless generosity, Polly’s enthusiasm and zest for life could not be more at odds with Annie’s jaded cynicism.

Because if terminal illness has taught Polly anything, it’s that in order to discover a rainbow, sometimes you have to put up with the rain. She also knows that time is short. Too short to waste a single day, which is precisely why she wants Annie to join her on a mission...to celebrate life, while she still has the chance.

Together these two unlikely friends embark on the “100 Happy Days” challenge, with a goal of doing one happy thing each day for 100 days. The tasks are relatively simple: Smile at strangers. Give someone flowers. Be honest. Be silly. Let go. And while Annie is initially skeptical, she soon finds that days spent riding rollercoasters and dancing in fountains with Polly begin to mend her broken heart—even as the progression of Polly’s illness threatens to shatter it all over again. SOMETHING LIKE HAPPY contemplates what it means to be happy and challenges readers to embrace life in all its messiness—the ups and the downs, the love and the loss, the joys and the devastations. Because as Annie will discover, happiness—or something like it—is always possible.

Get it on AMAZON

ABOUT EVA WOODS

Eva Woods was inspired to write SOMETHING LIKE HAPPY after

surviving her own brush with cancer and the breakdown of her marriage.

Raised in a small village in Northern Ireland, Woods now lives in London,

where she teaches creative writing and regularly contributes to Marie

Claire UK, xoJane, and other publications. She writes crime fiction as

Claire McGowan.