What Happens at Night
A Novel
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4.3 • 8 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A struggling couple finds themselves at a European hotel full of eccentric, unsettling patrons in this “surreal, funny, heartbreaking story of love and mortality” (Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours).
“Like a Kafka story and a Wes Anderson movie combined.” —Literary Hub
“An eerie tale of desire and death.” —Refinery 29, Best Book of the Year
“Retools the Victorian ghost story . . . intriguing and moving.” —WSJ
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).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this dreamlike, resonant fable, Cameron (Coral Glynn) depicts a pair of lost souls who travel to the edge of the world. Two unnamed New Yorkers in a frosty marriage disembark from a train in Borgarfjaroasysla, a fictional, far-northern European city, and check into the elegant Grand Imperial Hotel. The childless couple has come to the wintry land to adopt a baby boy from an orphanage, and they're baffled, frustrated, and occasionally comforted by the city's inhabitants as they endure delays with the adoption. There's a mannered quality to the pervasive strangeness (a receptionist maintains an "impassive, unseeing attitude"; long dark days end before they begin), and the occasionally solemn dialogue doesn't help ("I know what I've become. How I am. What I am"), but generally Cameron doles out the right amount of eeriness and eccentricity. Livia Pinheiro-Rima, a bighearted lounge singer and pathological liar who looks after the adrift couple, is particularly memorable. Less convincing is the portrait of a local healer, Brother Emmanuel, whose mystic aura inspires the wife with hopes of recovery from her cancer. A torpor hangs over the events and protagonists, who respond passively to the bizarre world around them. While the idiosyncratic setting can sometimes serve as a foil for the couple, their response makes Cameron's admirable tale emotionally affecting.
