The End of Nightwork

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The End of Nightwork is a novel to savour, poignant and quietly devastating. I kept turning it over in my mind after I had finished reading it, and the more I thought about it, the more I saw. Forgotten the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Visit BookSleuth I finally had the time to read this book. And I ended up reading it in one sitting!!!!! It was SO GOOD!!!!! 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. It's an odd conspiracy theory that seems to owe more to Pizzagate and Q-Anon and, in the UK, the fantasies of Carl Beech and the ill-fated Operation Midland, than, say, to Climate XR, but with obvious links to Pol's own condition, mentally still young but, by the novel's end, elderly, and labelled by Kourist's as a 'Hoarist'.

I want to start by saying that I tried to keep my walls up about our main character. He has so many names, but Booth is the most important. I tried so hard not to love him and failed completely. He was just a kid when he stole to keep his mother's bills paid while she fought the demon that is cancer. He was barely out of high school when he lost her. He traveled and changed who he was and existed in a world that never gave him a chance. Cynthia is involved with an anarchist movement which believes that “every problem that exists in society… is brought about by the hatred of the young by the old”. It is an extreme idea worth considering.Oh, the journey this book and I went on. I loved Booth/Harry! His moral code reminded me of early Dexter... but with less death ;) When speaking with the Augury,’ McCaul wrote, ‘I have the curious sensation that I am speaking to Ebenezer Scrooge. Her childhood and her adulthood are not lifetimes. They are, rather, prophetic episodes, episodes in a sad and sadly limited sequence.’ While the fashionable method of short, separated paragraph units sometimes impedes the prose, Pol’s understated wit is fine company FYI, I almost DNFed this thing four times. It was painful to get through. The flow was so bad. I did start to skim towards the halfway point because I found myself not caring a whit about what was going on.

This story starts out with an unusual main character for a Roberts story. A guy. A kid really and we are with him as he tells his story and grows. He educates himself in ways we cannot believe. He loves hard and works hard. He protects what and who he loves always. He continues to learn and grow.

Pol has a rare condition which means his body ages in sudden bursts, rather than gradually. At thirteen he aged ten years overnight, and now he is in his thirties but looks a decade younger. Roberts develops her characters beautifully and the story really is in the intricate details. While it seems to start slowly, the build-up and the ending make it worth the wait! Awesome twist. I just wish there was more of this, and less "dropped", random details that are supposed to help brush a picture of who the characters are, but end up like reference dropping. For example, all the music bands Caroline loves didn't help me understand her as a person. So I wish that what felt expandable in the story had been replaced by more details about mythology, philosophy, and more existential ponderings diving into the main character's condition.

Hive Store Ltd 2020. (hive.co.uk) is registered in England. Company number: 07300106. VAT number: 444950437. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. I also loved the Red Goddess of the story. Megs, Dauphine, Sebastian... I loved the theatre kids both in college and at the high school. For me, the sign of an awesome author is one who changes the tide of the story with such subtlety that you do not even realize it is happening. Digital Reads A Curse For True Love : the thrilling final book in the Once Upon a Broken Heart seriesAn unsettling example of writer, prophet and protagonist collapsing into one character. Isao is a young nationalist militant. Obsessed with the historical account of a group of samurai who performed seppuku in the aftermath of a failed coup, Isao organises his own plot to assassinate a group of prominent capitalists. Arrested and imprisoned, Isao experiences a number of dream-visions in which he foresees his own death. In one he is killed by a venomous snake and at the same time has a realisation: “I was not meant to die like this. I was meant to die by cutting open my stomach.” At the novel’s conclusion, Isao assassinates the capitalist Kurahara and then performs seppuku. A year after the publication of Runaway Horses Mishima himself staged an ill-fated coup and followed suit.

The End of Nightwork is a satisfyingly odd novel. It is both an urgent grappling with the frightening times we live in and a meditation on what Chaucer called “the woe that is in marriage”. 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 La Porte didn’t feel like the dangerous villain of the story that he was meant to be. Their first meeting and conflict wasn’t intense enough for me to feel like Booth needed to fear La Porte and live his life in hiding. I just didn’t feel the danger or urgency. When Booth was forced to do a job I thought there would be more time spent on the heist and having to leave his life behind but it was breezed through. What an exceptional read!! Nightwork by Nora Roberts is a standalone novel with an excellent range of characters – just as Ms Roberts always writes. Mags was wonderful, and the love she had for her nephew stood out. The people we meet on the way through Harry’s journey play a great part, some good, some not so good – just as they’re meant to be. I thoroughly enjoyed this stunning romantic suspense novel – such a pleasurable read - and have no hesitation in recommending it highly. 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."Roberts really is an accomplished story-teller, making this very readable, with characters who endear themselves to the reader and repay the investment of time and emotion. And this story has everything a reader could want: food, theatre, theft, love and romance, and a clever sting to turn the tables on a ruthless collector. Enjoyable, entertaining and hard to put down. 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.” Cottrell-Boyce is an ambitious writer and, for all its concern with bleak futures, his debut left me intrigued to see what he writes next.