Day for Night
A Novel
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
From the author of Ice Diaries, winner of the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival Grand Prize, praised by the New York Times as “stunningly written” and a Guardian Best Book of 2018.
An unflinching exploration of love and boundaries in Brexit-crazed London.
Richard Cottar is a respected independent film writer and director; his wife, Joanna, is his increasingly successful and wealthy producer. Together they are about to embark on a film about the life of Walter Benjamin, the German Jewish intellectual who killed himself in northern Spain while on the run from the Nazis in 1940. In what looks set to be the last year of Britain’s membership of the European Union, Benjamin’s story of exile and statelessness is more relevant than ever. But Richard and Joanna’s symbiotic life takes a sudden turn when they cast an intelligent, sexually ambiguous young actor in the role of Walter Benjamin. In a climate of fear and a bizarre, superheated year redolent of sex and hidden desire, Richard and Joanna must confront their relationship, Benjamin’s tragic history, and the future of their country.
Taking its cue from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Day for Night is an unsettling, riveting story of reversals — of gender, power, and history.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
In this strange and poetic novel, Jean McNeil captures the surreal feeling that seemed to permeate the UK during the initial Brexit campaign. Indie filmmaker Richard Cottar and his producer wife, Joanna, are embarking on their most ambitious project: a biopic about persecuted German Jewish intellectual Walter Benjamin, who died by suicide while attempting to flee the Nazis. But this won’t be an ordinary film—especially after Walter’s ghost turns up and ensconces himself in Richard’s life. With the uncomfortable spectre of Brexit in the background and the presence of an actual ghost haunting his production, Richard’s story becomes a brilliant maze of tragic history, artistic expression, and sexual desire. McNeil even makes a few smart allusions to Virginia Woolf as she uses otherworldly magic to explore mundane topics like aging and marital woes. Personally, politically, and even spiritually, everything about Day for Night feels like a reckoning.
