Tom Newlands’s Something Like Happiness follows Frazer and Caitlin, a struggling Scottish couple in their mid-20s raising their silent autistic five-year-old son, Jamie, in a decaying new town. The review portrays it as a bleak but compassionate examination of poverty, grief, domestic abuse, anger and neurodivergence, centred on the fallout after Caitlin violently assaults Frazer during an argument.

Frazer refuses to leave the mould-ridden flat where he grew up, despite the family receiving a council house, while Caitlin’s volatile behaviour and her mother’s efforts to separate him from Jamie intensify the pressure. The reviewer finds the novel less textured than Newlands’s 2024 debut, Only Here, Only Now, but praises its heartrending depiction of the parents’ care for Jamie and its vivid, bleak sense of place; it also raises whether their protectiveness may prevent him from integrating with other children.