Day for Night (Paperback)
Description
As a child, Beverly Rabinowitz fled Europe with her mother during World War II. Almost half a century later, while she is vacationing in Florida, a chance encounter leads to a strangely lucid moment in which she senses that her father, long believed to have been killed during the war, is close by. It's the first of many seemingly random events that are guiding her toward a startling discovery.
In the course of Frederick Reiken's provocative, intricate novel, Beverly will learn that her story is part of something larger. Because the story is not hers alone--it's also the story of a comatose teenage boy in Utah, an elusive sixties-era fugitive, an FBI agent pursuing a twenty-year obsession, a Massachusetts veterinarian who falls in love on a kibbutz in Israel, and a host of other characters. DAY FOR NIGHT illuminates how disparate, far-flung people can be connected, and how the truth of those bonds can upend entire lives. Each chapter is a small universe of its own, and together they form a dazzling whole.
About the Author
Frederick Reiken is the author of two previous novels, The Odd Sea (1998) and The Lost Legends of New Jersey (2000). His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker and his essays in the anthology Living on the Edge of the World (2008). He has worked as a reporter and columnist and is currently a member of the writing faculty at Emerson College.
Praise for Day for Night…
"Brilliant plotting, haunting characters and an elegiac tone distinguish this dazzling novel by Reiken...Contemporary fiction at its best-accessible, breathtaking and heartbreaking."--Kirkus Reviews (starred)
"An intricate, subtly fantastic, six-degrees-of-separation tale shaped by the beauty, continuity, and mystery of nature. . . . It's an entrancing and profoundly complicated tale Reiken tells as he slowly reveals the submerged connections among his intriguing characters while sustaining psychological sophistication, suspense, shrewd humor, and many-tiered compassion."--Booklist (starred)
"A compelling tale in which one thread deftly connects 10 people....An imaginative and exciting read."--Publishers Weekly
"What begins as a typical family drama becomes a chain reaction of plot twists. . . . . Day for Night is a beautiful test in patience, but by the end, you'll see it was worth the wait."--Very Short List
"A thought-provoking, intricate portrait of the far-reaching, intergenerational implications of the Holocaust - and how fortuitous circumstances can bring people from both sides of a tragedy closer together, and, in some cases, further apart."--S. Kirk Walsh, Los Angeles Times
"Day for Night is a joy and a rare thing, a feast for the mind and the heart that almost demands a second reading."--Daniel Goldin, Boswell Book Co./NPR
"This novel magically and eloquently links swimming with manatees in Florida with a comatose young man held hostage in Utah, a fugitive radical woman, and a kibbutz on the Dead Sea. It's beautifully written, magnificently cerebral, entirely compelling."-- Ellen Meeropol, Odyssey Bookshop
