You Could Be Happy Here: A Novel

This haunting story transports us to the wild, rocky coast of Central America—and into the heart of a woman searching for the father she never knew.

Lucy—single, childless, in her thirties—studies insects and ecosystems to try to make sense of human behavior. But she’s still mystified by a series of events that shatter her idea of who she is and where she belongs. Her mother dies prematurely, her sister claims the Northern California family home, and Lucy learns that her real father is apparently a Costa Rican they knew when the family spent summers in the coastal village of Palmita.

Reeling, disinherited, and recently demoted at work, Lucy heads south in search of her biological father and the land he may have bequeathed her. But the man is nowhere to be found, and none of the locals seem to remember her. The dreamy, off-grid paradise she recalls from childhood has become a hard-edged town leery of hotel-building, forest-razing outsiders. Will Lucy, too, be judged an interloper? Or will she rise to the challenge: rethink her place in the world, open her heart, and expand her notion of kinship and home?