This book is extremely detailed and descriptive of every event.
I, though, found it disconnected and rambling.
I just never could find myself involved in the storyline, except when on the hunt for the protection of the coyotes.
I had to make myself finish the book, but with lots of skimming the pages toward the end.

A chance meeting on Waterloo Bridge in London introduces the reader to two very interesting and utterly believable characters,, Atilla from Accra and Jean from the USA. 
They are both in London to work. Jean is a scientist studying urban foxes. She has studied coyotes in her hone town and faced aggressive and unfounded opposition from people unwilling to change their point of view.
She faces the same wall of ignorance in London, and seems outnumbered and unable to put across her scientific facts, being simply labelled the fox lady.
The studies on coyote population and the link between urban foxes and fast food I found particularly interesting, having studied ecology years ago. I felt like this was a character I wanted to listen to.
By contrast Atilla, the man Jean bumped into on Waterloo Bridge, travels widely giving speeches on trauma in civilians living in war zones.
As a psychiatrist, his job is to assess the damage of survivors of trauma brought about by horrific incidents of war.
His life, after the death of his wife, seems to be hotels and restaurants and conferences, with moments of happiness briefly caught when listening to music and dancing by himself.
While in London he has been asked by friends to seek out their daughter and her son, whom they have not heard from for a while. He is also distracted by an old friend of his, Rosie, who has early dementia and is confined to a nursing home.
With help, Atilla discovers the daughter of his friend, Ama, and her son Tano have been unjustly evicted from their home by immigration officials and Ama, a diabetic, has been admitted to hospital. Tano  ran away before social services could get to him, and is now hiding in London. 
Atilla meets Jean again and she gets her network of night workers and traffic wardens to look for the missing boy. This mixed group of workers all help Jean track foxes. They work day and night for low pay, and most have a traumatic background which is briefly explained without interrupting the flow of the narrative.
Tano is found, and he stays with Jean while his mother is in hospital, which develops the bond between Jean and Atilla.
Towards the end of the book, Atilla is finally due to make his speech it is one he has done many times before, but now he looks at it and finds fault. He changes it at the last minute, his new views going against the usual trauma victim care approach. 
Atilla questions the nature of happiness. Trauma victims are not happy, but should true happiness ever exist in anyone who has lived a life with any form of grief or horror or incident? Does pure happiness only exist alongside pure innocence, as in infancy? 
I found these characters and ideas interesting and thought provoking, and yet I did not get the feelings, as the reader often does, that the author is using characters simply to put across their personal ideas because the characters have depth and individuality.
At one point the fact that Atilla seemed to have links with some of the network of night workers and hotel workers was unrealistically coincidental, but even so , this was used to highlight Atilla's work in the field and when read as such it worked.

Thank you Net Galley for the free ARC. This book combines the search for a missing child with a woman's study of foxes in London. The two main characters meet and work together to track what happened to the child. Confusing.

A lovely book, which has been both beautifully and thoughtfully written.

Happiness by Aminatta Forna reads like a character study where even the most minor people get some in-depth background details.  The two main characters, Attila and Jean, meet by coincidence and the story goes on to describe them individually as well as how they interact. "Attila was not unhappy, he was simply living with a grief that had become his quiet companion." It's a slow mover but stories of the two are interesting enough to keep the reader engaged.  First part of the book has a little bit of mystery and the last half has a little romance.  The writing style of going back and forth is abrupt and the change of scenes from one paragraph to the next is sometimes disconcerting.  The book has many layered themes: loneliness, grief, love, death, hope, as well as coyotes, foxes, and parakeets.  "Everything happens for a reason, that was Jean's view, and part of her job was tracing those chains of cause and effect, mapping the interconnectedness of things." There are many dramatic events (missing child, animal murder, death of a friend) yet they are handled in such a quiet way that they too seem to become just another emotion to add to the character study.  "'Trauma does not equal destiny.'...the emotional vulnerability of trauma is oftentimes transformed into emotional strength."  This is an interesting novel and I recommend it.