All the Days And Nights

From the author of ‘Black Bread White Beer’.

The East Coast of America, 1980.

Anna Brown, a dying artist, works on her final portrait. Obsessive and secretive, it is a righting of her past failures; her final statement.

John Brown, her husband and life-long muse, has left; walked out of their home one morning to travel cross-country in search of the paintings he has sat for.

As their stories unfold – independently, for the first time in many years – a passionate unconventional relationship is revealed, between two people living through the most tumultuous decades of modern history.

All the Days and Nights is the story of an art hunt during a twilight period of painting. It lays bare two relationships that are ever changing and incomparable: of the artist and the muse, and of lovers. It is an exploration of what it means to create, what it means to inspire, what it means to live.

Reviews

A Book of the Year 2014: THE OBSERVER and Netgalley

Longlisted for the Folio Prize 2015

Shortlisted for the Green Carnation Prize 2014

‘Intense, elegant, beautiful writing.’ The Times

‘Flashes of brilliance.’ Independent

‘Slender, stylish and moving.’ Observer

‘Beautifully written, elegiac in tone, it’s also surprisingly pacy, as gripping as any thriller … It’s a short novel, which is just as well, as it’s impossible to put down.’ John Harding, Daily Mail

‘A short, lyrical and densely written exploration of the relationship between artist and muse.’ Financial Times

‘Govınden is the kind of gentle modernist that contemporary Brıtish fiction needs; entertaining, intellectual, emotional, poetıc, fabulous.’ Deborah Levy

‘All the Days and Nights is short but dense with theme and subtle in its depiction of the central characters and their complex relationship.’ We Love This Book

‘A terrific idea.’ BBC Frontrow

'For our money the Man Booker Prize should have gone to Niven Govinden's fourth novel, All The Days and Nights' NetGalley

‘A potent exploration of an artist and her muses.’ Jeff Jackson

'Singular, astonishing and deeply emotive, All the Days and Nights is a flawlessly written work of insight and understanding. It confirms Niven Govinden as one of this country’s most original, intelligent and persuasive voices.’ Stuart Evers

‘Slender but dense, detached yet deeply moving, Niven Govinden's All The Days And Nights takes on the big subjects – art, love, death, and inspiration – with great subtlety and stealth.’ Rupert Thomson

‘All the Days and Nights is a beautifully sad novel that artfully captures the peculiar sense of knowing that death is approaching and what it is like to be forced to deal with loss before it has happened.’ Fiction Uncovered

‘Intriguing and somehow magical … a thoughtful and rewarding work.’ Independent on Sunday

‘A moving tale of love, memory and absence.’ Telegraph

About the author

Niven Govinden (born 1973) is an English novelist. He was born in East Sussex and then educated at Goldsmiths College where he studied film. He has written three novels. We Are The New Romantics was published by Bloomsbury in 2004. Graffiti My Soul was published by Canongate Books in January 2007 and Black Bread White Beer was published by The Friday Project in 2013. He has also written a number of short stories.