Dead Happy

By: Josh Silver

Narrated by: Huw Parmenter

The experiment continues in the dark and disturbingly thrilling conclusion to the HappyHead duology where Seb will find the secret to escaping is more heart-wrenching than he ever imagined.

Seb was sure surviving the experimental health center of HappyHead would be enough to send him home. But now he joins the top ten contestants in the next stage of the testing, which will take place on a remote island, under the watchful eye of a mysterious couple.

Unsure if Finn is dead or alive, Seb reluctantly teams up with Eleanor again as the pair are forced to compete in a series of ever stranger trials to prove their connection and get their lives back. But Seb can’t stop thinking about Finn and how he may have been too much of a threat to the program.

Determined to find him, Seb’s search uncovers an even darker reality…and the only way to escape the island will be to expose the sinister truth behind HappyHead once and for all.

Critic reviews

★ "Silver wraps up his duology in a way that is both satisfying and contemplative....[A] fresh take on dystopian fiction with themes of mental health and eugenics, it is a must-have for library collections worthy of its place next to Lois Lowry’s The Giver and Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games." —School Library Journal, starred review

"While still centering on themes of mental health and happiness in the digital age, this sequel raises the stakes with explorations of eugenics and just how far people will go to be happy. A thrilling sequel that brings this duology to a satisfying conclusion." —Kirkus Reviews

Dead Happy

Where the first book confined its horrors within the sterile walls of the HappyHead facility, Dead Happy relocates the experiment to the remote Scottish island of Elmhallow and uses that widened geography to deepen everything: the stakes, the moral complexity, and Seb’s voice, which is sharper and more self-aware than ever. Silver makes the difficult structural choice of separating Seb from Finn for much of the book, forcing the romance to operate through absence and uncertainty rather than proximity, and the gamble pays off completely. The eugenics logic underpinning the program becomes explicit here, which reframes the first book retroactively and gives the series a coherent ideological target: the sinister end point of institutions that presume to engineer human happiness by deciding who deserves it. Silver sticks the landing with an ending that delivers its emotional weight without softening the anger the duology has been building toward the whole time.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​