The End of Nightwork

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Meanwhile, the everyday conflicts and compromises he and Caroline experience are heightened by his condition and the response of the people around them to a man who is always either older or younger than he appears. Meanwhile, Jesse begins acting out at school and Pol’s mother’s dementia and his own increasingly vivid dreams lead him to re-examine the knotty dynamics of his family. This is a time-tumbling, unexpected and arresting novel of apocalypse, upheaval and familial love" Sean Hewitt

Nightwork is a book I would recommend to anyone who loves romance. It has everything that makes for a great novel. Loved it!!! Harry winds his leisurely way, as Silas Booth, to New Orleans, learning, always learning, discovering new things, making good friends and continuing to pay his way with a little nightwork. When a fence put him in touch with an accomplished thief, he ends up stealing a Turner sunset. The client insists on meeting him, but Silas is wary of the offer this privileged but greedy man makes. And despite it being published into 5 days into the New Year I have some confidence in predicting that this will be one of the quirkiest, most intelligent and idea-filled literary fiction (and definitely debut novels) published in 2023. While the fashionable method of short, separated paragraph units sometimes impedes the prose, Pol’s understated wit is fine company This was incredibly slow paced, I just couldn’t get into it. I didn't feel connected or invested in Booth so his experiences and travels were boring to me. I love morally grey characters but I’d simply describe Booth as a nice guy and a good person.

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For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. LaPorte was easy to hate, but in later portions of the book, he was less dimensional as a character, as where his henchmen. This book might be totally far-fetched and unrealistic… but it’s fiction. Don’t take yourself too seriously, and do read this book. The title comes from "The End of Nightwork and the Sundering of the Curtain in Twayn", Playfere's most famous work, but there are other references, some implicit (looking after a child overnight) and other's more explicit - an Irish relative who comes over to do nightwork on the Jubilee Line; "nightwork" used rather oddly as putting in effort to keep a family together; and passages like this:

At the end of his prophetic journey through hell, purgatory and heaven, Dante has a vision of a book. Standing in the presence of God, he sees “bound up with love together in one volume, what through the universe in leaves is scattered”. Here is a basic taxonomy then: God is a novelist. Human beings are His characters. Prophets are the readers.

I had convinced myself that this was historical fiction when it’s not. Oops. I’m actually way less interested in it as a contemporary story. At some point he gets a job as a tutor for the adopted daughter of two friends �� a disabled artist and social activist Cynthia who becomes involved in the Kourist movement which has grown on Reditt But while Pol is failing to complete his research on Playfere, he encounters a radical new movement that argues that all economic and political events are part of an aeon-long struggle between the old and the young – that the ‘hoarist’ habit of violence, their need to conquer, has also affected how they treat the planet. The leader of this popular movement predicts an imminent inter-generational conflict – father against son, mother against daughter – that echoes Playfere’s own prophecies. Following the defeat of the Nazis in 1945, the idea took hold that Austria had been the first casualty of Hitler’s aggression when in 1938 it was incorporated into the Third Reich.’

This book is told from the POV of Harry Booth. A young man who becomes a thief through necessity and talent. He fell in love with the ocean, the hills, New Orleans, North Carolina, and a beautiful girl named Miranda. He read, and educated himself and did everything he could to follow the rules he set when he was only 12 and doing the only thing he knew could work. When that all caught up to him, and he had to leave it all behind, he didn't think he'd fall in love with anything again. But isn't that just human nature? So he fell in love with a house. With his students. And with the same girl. And he would not be ran off from it again. Harry is also just kind of blah. I also wasn't in the mood to root for a thief. I feel like a little bit this was a little of her trying to do another "Roarke" type character for her readers. We all know that Roarke started off stealing as a kid and of course got involved with criminal gangs in Ireland and then New York. Most of the dialogue and circumstances about him I think were supposed to read as thief with heart of gold, but I just kept rolling my eyes. Also Harry does have "relations" with other women in this book so when you get to the whole "heroine" in this one you wonder why it even matters. I will add that I think that most of the books where Nora just follows a "hero" it does not work as well for me, see my review of "Shelter in Place." And yes, a little far-fetched and unbelievable. But I read for that. That amazing feeling and that bit of fancy.Prophets often appear in tragedies as beacons of the saddest sadness of all: that we are all fated to do the things that we do. From the Weird Sisters to Willy Wonka, prophets are employed by writers as the bearers of this very bad news. In Oedipus Rex, Sophocles’ blind prophet Tiresias is forced to tell tragic mother-effer Oedipus that he has no free will, and that “to his children he is both brother and father”. Like all prophets Tiresias is a lonely interloper in the world of normal time. “Alas,” he wails, “what misery to be wise.”