The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World

A wise, elegant discussion with a modern twist from Booker-shortlisted David Malouf on the fundamental question: what makes for a happy life?
 
In The Happy Life David Malouf addresses one of the most fundamental questions of all: what makes for a happy life? In an age where our bookshelves are stacked full of self-help volumes, popular philosophy and tales of perfect romantic love, his essay is pertinent and relevant. He asks why, when so many of the essential 'unhappinesses' -- premature death, famine, plague, material poverty -- have largely disappeared in the developed world, does happiness continue to elude us?
 
With elegance and insight, David Malouf discusses new and old ways to discuss the concept of happiness. He returns to the wisdom of the classics, and looks at how, thanks to Thomas Jefferson, happiness in the eighteenth-century became a 'right'; in a dialogue on Rubens and Rembrandt he explores the sensual happiness of the flesh; he covers the difficulties of the modern world's obsession with consumption, and the changing desires of the YouTube and Twitter generation; and finally the consolation and sympathy provided by art and literature.
 
In luminous prose, with ideas to savour and reflect upon, Malouf distills millennia of thought and philosophy in The Happy Life into a fascinating and tangible argument.

DAVID MALOUF is the internationally acclaimed author of novels including The Great World (winner of the Commonwealth Writers' prize and the Prix Femina Etranger), Remembering Babylon (shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award), An Imaginary Life, Conversations at Curlow Creek, Dream Stuff, Every Move You Make, his autobiographical classic 12 Edmondstone Street and Ransom. His Collected Stories won the 2008 Australia-Asia Literary Award. In 2008 Malouf was the Scottish Arts' Council Muriel Spark International Fellow. Born in 1934 in Brisbane, where he was brought up, he now lives in Sydney.