What Happens at Night

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Description

In this atmospheric, suspenseful novel, an American couple travels to a strange, snowy European city to adopt a baby, who they hope will resurrect their failing marriage. Their difficult journey leaves the wife, who is struggling with cancer, desperately weak, and her husband worries that her apparent illness will prevent the orphanage from releasing their child.

The couple check into the cavernous and eerily deserted Borgarfjaroasysla Grand Imperial Hotel where the bar is always open, the restaurant serves thirteen-course dinners from centuries past, and the doors of the guest rooms have been salvaged from demolished opera houses. Their attempt to claim their baby is both helped and hampered by the people they encounter: an ancient, flamboyant chanteuse, a debauched businessman, an enigmatic faith healer, and a stoic bartender who dispenses an addictive, lichen-flavoured schnapps. Nothing is as it seems in this mysterious, frozen world, and the longer the couple endure the punishing cold the less they seem to know about their marriage, themselves, and life itself.

'Thrillingly mysterious and gorgeously written.' - Sigrid Nunez

Reviews

'A surreal, funny, heart-breaking story about love and mortality.'- Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours and The Snow Queen

'So beautiful and so unnerving, so poised between miracle and disaster.'- Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You and Cleanness

'This book is a masterpiece. [...]. Unique, unexpected, unforgettable.'- Edmund White, author of A Boy's Own Story

'Thrillingly mysterious and gorgeously written.'- Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend

Author Bio

Peter Cameron is the author of several novels, including Andorra, The Weekend, and Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Rolling Stone, and many other literary journals. Merchant Ivory made a film based on his novel The City of Your Final Destination and James Ivory is presently adapting his novel Coral Glynn for the screen. He lives in New York City and Vermont.