3.5
What Happens at Night
ByPublisher Description
"Faultlessly elegant and quietly menacing." —Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness and Small Rain
A couple find themselves at a fading, grand European hotel full of eccentric and sometimes unsettling patrons in this allegorical story that examines the significance of shifting desires and the uncertainty of reality
An unnamed American couple travels to a strange, snowy European city to adopt a baby. It’s a difficult journey that leaves the wife, who is struggling with cancer, desperately weak, and her husband worries that her illness will prevent the orphanage from releasing their child.
On arrival, the couple checks into the cavernous and eerily deserted Borgarfjaroasysla Grand Imperial Hotel where the bar is always open and the lobby populated with an enigmatic cast of characters ranging from an ancient, flamboyant chanteuse to a debauched businessman to an enigmatic faith healer. Nothing is as it seems in this baffling, frozen world, and the more the couple struggles to claim their baby, the less they seem to know about their marriage, themselves, and life itself.
For readers of Ian McEwan, Elizabeth Strout, and Iris Murdoch, What Happens at Night is a "masterpiece" (Edmund White) poised on the cusp of reality, told by "an elegantly acute and mysteriously beguiling writer" (Richard Eder, The Boston Globe).
A couple find themselves at a fading, grand European hotel full of eccentric and sometimes unsettling patrons in this allegorical story that examines the significance of shifting desires and the uncertainty of reality
An unnamed American couple travels to a strange, snowy European city to adopt a baby. It’s a difficult journey that leaves the wife, who is struggling with cancer, desperately weak, and her husband worries that her illness will prevent the orphanage from releasing their child.
On arrival, the couple checks into the cavernous and eerily deserted Borgarfjaroasysla Grand Imperial Hotel where the bar is always open and the lobby populated with an enigmatic cast of characters ranging from an ancient, flamboyant chanteuse to a debauched businessman to an enigmatic faith healer. Nothing is as it seems in this baffling, frozen world, and the more the couple struggles to claim their baby, the less they seem to know about their marriage, themselves, and life itself.
For readers of Ian McEwan, Elizabeth Strout, and Iris Murdoch, What Happens at Night is a "masterpiece" (Edmund White) poised on the cusp of reality, told by "an elegantly acute and mysteriously beguiling writer" (Richard Eder, The Boston Globe).
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesWhat Happens at Night Reviews
3.5
mar
Created 14 days agoShare
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Bridget Roe
Created 29 days agoShare
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“I devoured this book thinking it would have some crazy twist. It starts out like The Shining or I’m Thinking of Ending Things. And then it just…dissolves into nothing. Picked it up because I saw Scorsese was making the movie adaptation with Leo and Jennifer Lawrence. Here’s hoping he takes some artistic liberties to make it more like Shudder Island.”
Eileen
Created about 1 month agoShare
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Chad
Created about 1 month agoShare
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“What a wonderfully strange book. Bits of horror, drama, tragedy, and character study, all set in a dreary almost otherworldly city as a couple from New York City attempts to adopt a child. Unsettling and mysterious from start to finish.”
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