The City in the Middle of the Night

Name: The City in the Middle of the Night
Rating: 3.257 (665 reviews)
ISBN: 9781466871137

By Charlie Jane Anders

Publisher Description

LOCUS AWARD FINALIST!

“This generation’s Le Guin.” —Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less

Charlie Jane Anders, the nationally bestselling author of All the Birds in the Sky delivers a brilliant new novel set in a hauntingly strange future with #10 LA Times bestseller The City in the Middle of the Night.

"If you control our sleep, then you can own our dreams... And from there, it's easy to control our entire lives."

January is a dying planet—divided between a permanently frozen darkness on one side, and blazing endless sunshine on the other. Humanity clings to life, spread across two archaic cities built in the sliver of habitable dusk.

But life inside the cities is just as dangerous as the uninhabitable wastelands outside.

Sophie, a student and reluctant revolutionary, is supposed to be dead after being exiled into the night. Saved only by forming an unusual bond with the enigmatic beasts who roam the ice, Sophie vows to stay hidden from the world, hoping she can heal.

But fate has other plans—and Sophie's ensuing odyssey and the ragtag family she finds will change the entire world.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

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The City in the Middle of the Night Reviews

3.0

Amanda Reading Books

Created about 20 hours ago

“Mannnn, I wanted to like this. There were definitely things about it I liked - the worldbuilding, the alien species, and Mouth's backstory. Other than that, this just didn't work. But let's start with the good! -The worldbuilding is pretty interesting. We are on a tidally locked planet called January which rotates at the same pace as it does to orbit, placing one side of the planet always in the sun and the other always in the freezing night. Humans populated into two major cities in the dusk zone of each extreme with only dangerous paths to connect them. Both cities suck in their own way. -The alien species look like crocodiles to humans so they are referred to as such; however, they are an intelligent species with telepathic powers. They're cool once you get to know them ;) -Mouth as we know her is a loud spoken smuggler. What we learn about her heritage, how she became a smuggler, and where her name really comes from is probably the most interesting part of the book. On to the not so great :( -The book centers on two main character: Mouth and Sophie, with two others side POVs. While Mouth was mostly interesting because of her background, Sophie's almost exclusively focuses on Bianca and like WHY!? She gets a little more interesting as she interacts with the "crocodiles" but other than that, she does nothing and is no one. - Am I EVER supposed to have liked Bianca? Because I clocked her character immediately and it is truly shocking that it took Sophie most of the book to figure her out, and even then I don't think she really did. Bianca is the absolute worst. - There is zero plot. But there sort of is. It's less like a plotless character driven novel and more like a book that tried to have multiple plot threads but couldn't figure out which one to focus on and so nothing really happened on page but some things happened off page. Ok that's all I got. I honestly hated Bianca so much it was super distracting.”

Sarah Martin

Created 9 days ago

Adeca Chareunsab

Created 19 days ago

Stacey

Created 28 days ago

Natalie

Created about 1 month ago

About Charlie Jane Anders

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of Lessons in Magic and Disaster, coming August 2025 from Tor Books. Her other novels include All the Birds in the Sky, The City in the Middle of the Night and the young-adult Unstoppable trilogy. She's also the author of the short story collection Even Greater Mistakes, and Never Say You Can't Survive (August 2021), a book about how to use creative writing to get through hard times. She's won the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, Lambda Literary, Crawford and Locus Awards. She co-created Escapade, a transgender superhero, for Marvel Comics and wrote her into the long-running New Mutants comic. And she's currently the science fiction and fantasy book reviewer for the Washington Post. With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.