Mo Moore, estranged daughter of a sex-aid entrepreneur, regards her father as good as dead. And then he really does die and leaves her all his wealth. Stuck in a job in elderly care, newly single, and with nothing and no-one to keep her in England, Mo does what she’s always done when things get tough:
she runs. It could have been anywhere, but a classified ad catches Mo’s eye, and it takes her to China.
She lands in Pingdi, a remote mountain village that for centuries supplied dildos to the Imperial bedchamber, and whose revived sex-aid factory is in a financial fix. Soon Mo finds herself on the wrong side of the authorities and needing all the help she can get: China is a land of pointing fingers and blind eyes, of closed doors and open secrets, of rules and recklessness – a place, she discovers, where it’s not easy to be female.
The Happiness Factory is about the families we run from and a love story to the families we make for ourselves – sometimes in the most unexpected places. It’s a portrait of a country as it emerges from a Maoist past into its roaring global present. And at its heart are fathers: the way they make you and mark you, and how they follow you, however far you go – even to the furthest edge of China.

JO McMILLAN has lived and worked in China, Malaysia and the UK, and is currently based in Berlin. She has a PhD in anthropology. Her writing has appeared in Granta, Traveller and the Times Higher Education Supplement. Her first novel, Motherland, was published in the UK and in Germany.