Overnight
Journeys, Conversations and Stories After Dark
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
There is something special about the night.
For many, just the idea of it conjures thoughts of starlit skies, romance, of being tucked up in bed. For others, the night means fear, vulnerability and sleeplessness. At night things go bump, owls take wing and foxes prowl.
Overnight is a celebration of all things nocturnal, a hymn to nighttime wildlife, travel, dreams and art.
Along the way, Dan Richards meets a fascinating array of people who labour while the rest of us sleep, and brings their work into the light.
From night terrors to the glow of watching the dawn break on the summer solstice, Overnight will change the way you think about the hours after dark.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Richards (Outpost), the host of the BBC Radio 4 show Only After Dark, offers an atmospheric chronicle of late-night activities, jobs, and other goings-on. Many of the most fascinating chapters focus on infrastructure that continues to require maintenance long after most people are in bed—shipping terminals, railway yards, mail-sorting centers. The jobs range from thrilling and dangerous—manning a rescue helicopter flying over the ocean at night, staffing the annual 24-hour auto race at Le Mans—to the mundane, like parenting a newborn (which involves the author reading, and hence analyzing, Tove Jansson's Moominland Midwinter for its nocturnal themes) and working at a bakery. Later chapters begin to take on a bit of a recursive irony—in one, Richards tells the story of telling the story of a nighttime encounter during a different nighttime encounter; in another, he undergoes a sleep study to treat the insomnia that led him to make his career out of nighttime encounters in the first place. Richards combines exquisitely poetic ruminations ("3 a.m.'s the worst time—languishing at low tide, sad, soul out... oblivion o'clock") with man-on-the-street reporting that gives the surreal impression one really could run into just about anybody at night (including a philosophical Michael Fassbender). Readers will be engrossed.
