What Happens at Night Audiobook

Quotes

• "[A] dreamline, resonant fable . . . Cameron doles out the right amount of eeriness and eccentricity . . . emotionally affecting.

  — Publishers Weekly

• A snow-swept journey to the ends of the Earth continues Cameron's exploration of defamiliarized landscapes and the intricacies of human relationships . . . A dreamy fable confronting love, death, and our inevitable inadequacy yet persistence in the face of both.

  — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

• [An] atmospheric and philosophical tale . . . The claustrophobic setting somehow brilliantly and counterintuitively creates the space for Cameron (Coral Glynn, 2012) to expand the interiority of his characters, to spelunk down into their psychological labyrinths, and follow the paths wherever they might lead, leaving the reader transfixed and wonderfully disoriented. This willingness to construct a consciousness out of language shares a sensibility with such mid-century European masters as Stefan Zweig and Robert Walser and rewards close reading." ―Booklist

• Peter Cameron’s What Happens at Night is a surreal, funny, heartbreaking story about love and mortality. Cameron’s sense of balance between the comic and the catastrophic, between cynicism and sincerity, is astonishing. This book reminds me of nothing else I’ve ever read, which is high praise indeed." ―Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours and The Snow Queen

• Peter Cameron has long been among my favorite contemporary writers. He’s a compassionate and unsparing surveyor of all that comprises human character. What Happens at Night finds its home among the mid-twentieth-century classics of psychological realism, as brutal, in its way, as The Sheltering Sky, and just as memorable, just as peopled with the deep human mysteries. This new novel is a powerful and admirable addition to Cameron's estimable body of work." ―Rick Moody, author of the The Ice Storm and The Long Accomplishment

• I don't think I've ever read a book by an American or by a living person that's as exquisitely rendered as What Happens at Night. Every word is exactly as it should be; there is not a single extra word out of place. The novel feels as though it traveled through time to arrive here. Cameron's prose creates an effect that is literally like a fugue (or cinematic fog): intense, beautiful, inescapable, and so much about grief that has been and grief that is to come, heartbreaking and tender. The story is so intense, such a fine reduction of the enormity of the dreams of marriage, the responsibilities of marriage, of life, of love, and the ways in which―unintentionally or not―we inevitably fail each other and ourselves." ―A. M. Homes, author of Days of Awe and May We Be Forgiven

• The prose in What Happens at Night is faultlessly elegant and quietly menacing, like a tuxedo lined with knives. I can’t think of another book at once so beautiful and so unnerving, so poised between miracle and disaster. Peter Cameron is one of America’s greatest writers, the living stylist I most revere.” ―Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You and Cleanness

• This book is a masterpiece―reading it reminds me of the first time I read Kafka. A whole new vision is suddenly revealed: unique, unexpected, unforgettable. Get ready for a new adjective: Cameronesque.” ―Edmund White, author of A Boy’s Own Story

• In his characteristically precise and lucid prose, Peter Cameron invents a virtuosic tale that is by turns terrifying, comic, and heartbreaking. We do not always know whether we are in the realm of the real or the hallucinatory in this thrillingly mysterious and gorgeously written novel. What is never in doubt is that we are in the hands of a ravishing stylist and a supremely gifted storyteller." ―Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend

• In the beautiful What Happens at Night, Peter Cameron sends a married couple to a mysterious northern country where only the schnapps is reliable. The world he creates is both recognizable and enchantingly strange. I never knew what was going to happen next, and I couldn’t stop turning the pages. A profound pleasure for readers." ―Margot Livesey, author of Mercury and The Flight of Gemma Hardy