The Midnight Club
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- £11.99
Publisher Description
A twisty, nostalgic, emotionally thrilling novel about a group of estranged college friends who experiment with a secret substance that allows them to re-live their memories—and the fallout when they uncover startling truths about a dark event from their past
“A strange, riveting, brilliant fable. Like a fever-dream of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.” —LEV GROSSMAN
“How could you leave the past undisturbed when it was hiding parts of you from yourself?”
It’s been twenty-five years since The Midnight Club last convened. A tight-knit group of college friends bonded by late nights at the campus literary magazine, they’re also bonded by something darker: the death of their brilliant friend Jennet junior year. But now, decades later, a mysterious invitation has pulled them back to the pine-shrouded Vermont town where it all began.
As the estranged friends gather for a weeklong campus reunion, they soon learn that their host has an ulterior motive: she wants them to uncover the truth about the night Jennet died, and she’s provided them with an extraordinary method—a secret substance that helps them not only remember but relive the past.
But each one of the friends has something to hide. And the more they question each other, the deeper they dive into their own memories, the more they understand that nothing they thought they knew about their college years, and that fateful night, is true.
The Midnight Club explores that innate desire to revisit our first loves, our biggest mistakes, and the gulf between who we are and who we hoped we’d be.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Four friends relive a tragic event from their college years in this taut and introspective time-travel thriller from Harrison (Only She Came Back). In 1989 at Dunstan College in Vermont, five members of the school's literary magazine staff—self-conscious Byron, quiet artist Jennet, outsider Sonia, intellectual Paul, and rowdy Auraleigh—form the Midnight Brunch Club, staying up late drinking and eating Auraleigh's sumptuous omelets. All are disturbed by an anonymous article in the magazine titled "The Warning," which declares, "What's going to kill us is that we can't stop looking backwards." Soon thereafter, Jennet drowns under mysterious circumstances. The resulting grief, fear, and guilt put the surviving club members on a path to disappointing adulthoods, marred by broken marriages, wanderlust, and faulty memories about Jennet's death. In 2014, Auraleigh invites the gang to her bed & breakfast near the college to drink the mysterious "elixir of the pines," which will enable them to travel back to the past to learn once and for all whether Jennet's death was suicide, an accident, or murder, and in the process figure out where their lives went wrong. Harrison meticulously weaves flashbacks, elaborate time-travel twists, and the perspectives of each main character into a suspenseful saga about regret and missed opportunities. This deserves to be savored.
