Faber announces Jem Calder’s standout debut novel, I Want You to Be Happy
By Faber Editor, 29 October 2025
Jem Calder’s debut novel, I Want You to Be Happy, has been announced by Faber, to be published May 2026.
Chuck and Joey meet in a bar. He’s in his mid-thirties; she’s twelve years younger. He’s long abandoned his ambition of becoming a novelist and now works as a copywriter at a big ad agency. “Lead copywriter,” he corrects himself. Joey lives paycheck to paycheck on her barista wages and privately dreams of making it as a poet. They go back to Chuck’s luxury flat—a world away from Joey’s cramped house-share, the crumbs in her bed. Soon, Joey’s imagining a future between them, and Chuck’s moving on from a major change in his recent past. Amazing, how meeting a new person can make you feel so new.
“Funny, excruciating, and true, I Want You to Be Happy is a sharp-eyed tale of two people searching for meaning and connection in modern times, missing the mark maybe, but trying.
Calder’s debut short story collection, Reward System, was published by Faber in 2022 to great acclaim. The Guardian described him as ‘a superb writer, by turns funny, graceful, acidly cynical, lyrical’.
Alex Bowler, Publisher said:
‘Jem is a standout writer with a standout debut — it possesses an addictive, penetrating, acidic point of view, and exposes fundamental and moving truths about the way many of us are living and loving now. It’s funny, it’s agony: it makes me happy.’
Jem Calder said:
‘My aim with writing this novel—as it always is with anything I write—was to release something into the world that I myself would be excited to read. I hope readers are compelled and moved by this story of two people trying to connect, and can see something of themselves reflected there. I’m so grateful that Faber has allowed me to realise this story in the way I’d imagined.’
Jem Calder was born in Cambridge, and lives and works in London. His fiction has been published in The Stinging Fly and Granta, and his debut short story collection, Reward System, was published by Faber in 2022.
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Funny, excruciating and true, this is the story of a new couple searching for meaning and connection in modern times – from ‘an extraordinarily gifted writer’ (Sally Rooney).