Q: I’m tired of sad and depressing themes, but want something that’s not a romcom in book form. Are there any happy novels that are also literary?

Anonymous, 56, New York City

Jojo Moyes is a bestselling author whose novels include Me Before You and, most recently, The Giver of Stars. She writes:

I’ve just judged two literary prizes and reading for both numbed my brain with bleakness. Like the misconception that comedic acting is somehow easier than Ibsen, so has “happy” literature somehow become equated with lightweight. Here are five novels that I hope might dispel that.

Paradise Lodge by Nina Stibbe. Or in fact any novel by Nina Stibbe. She has a very British comedic way of writing, in which it’s possible to detect everything from Wodehouse to the Mitfords, but in a grubbier, modern setting.

The poet Patricia Lockwood’s quirky and autobiographical Priestdaddy made me laugh so much in a car (a scene with her and her mother discussing motel sheets) that I had to pull over. (Yes I’ve cheated; it’s a memoir, but it reads like a novel.) Joyous, filthy in places and full of exquisite imagery and jokes.

On the tiny off chance you have not read it, the classic Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen is the deftest, wittiest and most beautifully constructed novel of social manners. It is both unputdownable and uplifting, but far from romcom.

The Young Visiters or Mister Salteena’s Plan is a 1919 novel by nine-year-old Daisy Ashford. Centred on Alfred Salteena, “an elderly man of 42”, it was published with spelling mistakes and descriptions intact and I defy anyone not to read it as a comedy masterpiece.

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez is funny, sad, sly and pragmatic. This is a love story that never goes quite where you think it will and ends with two elderly people being simultaneously in love and quite cross with each other. Blissful.

Jojo Moyes’s new short story, The Makeover, is included in A Fresh Start, a collection of stories by bestselling authors made for Quick Reads 2020 (Orion, £1) Find out more at readingagency.org.uk

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