Joy, in Kate Bowler's account, does not wait for life to get easier. After a stage-four cancer diagnosis and years of serious illness, she goes looking for the kind that shows up anyway.

Readical Key Points

• A national bestseller, according to the publisher
• Part memoir, part inquiry into joy, drawing on her own life and on historians, philosophers and scholars of religion
• Practices the book sets out include loosening control, trying something new and choosing charity
• Content note: the author writes about her stage-four cancer diagnosis and years of serious illness; personal reflection, not medical advice
• Hardcover, 304 pages, Dial Press, 2026; reviewed in Booklist

Bowler draws a line between joy and happiness. The joy she describes arrives without hard things being solved first, and she argues that chasing happiness can crowd it out. Her examples are small and specific: a lemur sunning itself, laughter at a funeral, an Atlantic swim beside a shark wrangler. Having studied America's fixation on progress as a divinity scholar, she sets that history beside her own years of illness.

Readers of her earlier books and podcast have a new one to add, and the publisher writes for anyone who feels stuck or undone by loss. It also puts one thing plainly: "This is not a book about fixing your life." Bowler supplies words for the ache and a handful of practices; as she tells it, joy still arrives on its own schedule.

About the Author

Kate Bowler is a three-time New York Times bestselling author whose books include Everything Happens for a Reason, No Cure for Being Human, Good Enough, The Lives We Actually Have, Blessed and The Preacher's Wife. She earned a master of religion degree at Yale Divinity School and a PhD at Duke University, where she has taught, and she has hosted the podcast Everything Happens.

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