Happiness Falls

Happiness Falls is a novel by the American writer Angie Kim, published in 2023 by Crown.

The book opens on the day a father and his younger son fail to return from a walk in a park near the family home in Virginia, and it is narrated by Mia, the eldest child, who is twenty, quick to argue and certain that she can reason her way to an explanation. Her brother Eugene has Angelman syndrome and does not speak, and he comes back on his own, hurt, with no way of telling anyone what happened to him or to their father. The family's decision about when to involve the police, and the fact that they did not do it immediately, is the first thing the book asks its reader to weigh.

The novel is a family story with a mystery inside it: a man missing, a child who cannot give evidence and a household whose members each know something different.