Description

SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE DIRECTED BY MARTIN SCORSESE, STARRING LEONARDO DICAPRIO AND JENNIFER LAWRENCE

A Spectator and a Refinery29 Best Book of the Year

“Like a Kafka story and a Wes Anderson movie combined, if you can wrap your brain around that. Suffice to say: it’s great.” LiteraryHub

A couple find themselves at a fading, grand European hotel full of eccentric and sometimes unsettling patrons in this allegorical story that examines the significance of shifting desires and the uncertainty of reality

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.

Publisher Review

"An intriguing, memorable book." * The Times * "This beautifully written and wonderfully droll novel brilliantly captures the frustrations and unease of being in a foreign environment." * The Spectator * "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) * "Like a Kafka story and a Wes Anderson movie combined, if you can wrap your brain around that. Suffice to say: it's great." * Literary Hub * "This beautifully eerie tale of desire and death goes down like an icy shot of schnapps: first it burns you with its chill, then it ignites in you a lingering fire... Cameron reveals himself to be a master at portraying grief and despair, longing and love." * Refinery29 * "[A] dreamlike, resonant fable... Cameron doles out the right amount of eeriness and eccentricity." * Publishers Weekly * "A menacing, suspenseful novel . . . will keep readers on tenterhooks, wondering how the tension will break." * Shelf Awareness * "Thrillingly mysterious and gorgeously written." * Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend * "A surreal, funny, heart-breaking story about love and mortality." * Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours and The Snow Queen * "This book is a masterpiece. [...] Unique, unexpected, unforgettable." * Edmund White, author of A Boy's Own Story * "So beautiful and so unnerving, so poised between miracle and disaster." * Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You and Cleanness * "Full of foreboding, What Happens At Night draws the reader on without questioning. A rich experience." * Literary Review * "What Happens at Night retools the Victorian ghost story . . . the novel's indeterminacy is both intriguing and moving, because it means that one character's loss is another's consummation, and an unbroken night is both a source of terror and the condition of a long-desired resting place." * The Wall Street Journal *