The Night Following

by Morag Joss

Book Overview

On a blustery April day, the quiet, rather private wife of a doctor discovers that her husband has been having an affair. Moments later, driving along a winding country road and distracted perhaps by... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385341180
• ISBN13: 9780385341189
• Release Date: February 2008
• Publisher: Delacorte Press
• Length: 354 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.3" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

subtle, harrowing, beautifully written

I've read a couple of Morag Joss's books in the past and thought they were really good but in this one she goes into new territory. 'The Night Following' is ambitious and original in the subject matter and the way the story is told and it works brilliantly. I won't go into the plot here as other reviewers have done that, but the northern saga within the novel (Joss captures perfectly the 'first novel' tone of Ruth's story, clumsy and cliched in places but still fairly readable), and Ruth's husband's tongue-tied letters to her that become increasingly expressive, and the narrator's version of events, including details from her own childhood that chime poignantly and mysteriously with Ruth's saga - all interweave in a mix of distinctive voices that Joss handles expertly. The last thirty pages or so are a brilliant final act, like a tragedy or an opera where you get the emotional climax and also a sort of intellectual and moral reckoning too, as Joss brings all the layers together and makes her protagonist reflect on her exile from the world. "There is no natural law in this world that can take such fragmentary and capricious refractions and make of them anything explicable and whole." Heartbreakingly sad but full of dark humour, this novel is a beautiful, haunting and uplifting account of what it is to make a fatal mistake and strive to make amends, to be tied to your past, and ultimately, to be human. Don't buy it if you like escapist happy endings, unputdownable if you warm to flawed, human characters that make you care and make you think.

Elegant; haunting; dark but brilliant! A masterpiece!

What are our lives but the stories that we weave in order for us to construct some semblance of meaning, not so much from the reality of the world we inhabit, as from the remembrances of the things that we have glimpsed in dream or otherwise imagined? How much of other people's stories do we absorb and make our own, binding them into our own life-threads through our sudden and everyday encounters? How easily -- casually almost -- can our life-story be altered or turned around by those encounters? Or by events that are thrust upon us by fate? Are the ghosts that surround us real, or do we simply make them as we need them to be? Can we turn back time and take over the life-story of another if we feel the need badly enough? Morag Joss' dark novel of deception, betrayal, guilt, loss, atonement and redemption is elegantly written and masterfully constructed. And for all that the events she unfurls within this book become ever more unlikely as it progresses, the story-telling is so engaging that any disbelief one might have simply falls away, as one is drawn ever deeper into her tale, in the hope that redemption and reparation will triumph in the end. Mixing pathos, poignancy and humour in a sharply observed and deftly painted picture of human relationships, "The Night Following" weaves a fabulous tale of interlocking and devastatingly interacting life-stories. These intertwine and affect each other at several narrative levels and in altogether unexpected ways in a stunningly brilliant story that pushes at the boundaries of psychological thriller and suspense novel but is so much more than either. Hauntingly beautiful in places but never less than dark throughout, this book is a masterpiece of invention and extremely cleverly built and executed. Reading it is like peeling the layers of an onion and not just because it has you reaching for the tissues time and time again! Wonderful stuff!

haunting complex psychological thriller

The woman is stunned to learn her spouse the handsome doctor is having affair. Distracted as she drives a winding back road, she fails to notice the woman on a bike in front of her as she comes out of a turn. The driver hits sexagenarian Ruth Mitchell, but instead of stopping, she drives away. The police fail to find the culprit who murdered Ruth in a hit and run vehicular homicide. However, the driver knows what she did and how she fled the scene. She feels haunted by her action and guilty by her reaction. She begins to watch the victim's husband Arthur from a distance. His raw grief rips her stomach further as he no longer cares about himself or anyone else. He cannot sleep as the nightmares wake him and he cannot take care of his home or himself. She serendipitously enters his home cleaning it. She becomes more brazen as she meets Arthur in person demanding he clean up his act, which he does as he believes a miracle has occurred; his Ruth has returned to him. Two marriages were shattered with that car accident, but it is the aftermath that digs incredibly deep into the convoluted human condition that makes for a haunting complex psychological thriller. Arthur and Ruth seem real as they react shockingly similar to what connects them, the death of his spouse by her. Yet that almost identical response feels genuine and makes for a powerful saga of loss, deception, and redemption. Harriet Klausner

The Guilty Party

The new novel by Morag Joss may very well be her most powerful book so far. I like her detective series (FUNERAL MUSIC, etc.), and I really like her suspense novels (HALF BROKEN THINGS, etc.), but THE NIGHT FOLLOWING adds a new dimension to her work. Her unnamed heroine, who accidentally kills a woman on a bicycle with her car, is the most vividly realized character Joss has yet created. If you're like me, you will feel for this sad, untethered woman from the very start. She is a certain age, unfulfilled in her past and her present, she's just learned that her husband is unfaithful, and now--this. But the usual questions raised by her dilemma--Will she be caught? Will she turn herself in?--are not the most pressing ones. Instead, we wonder how she will redeem herself, and what she will do about her victim's helpless, grieving husband. The surprising answers are at the heart of this remarkable novel. I won't soon forget it. Highly recommended.

"Daylight came bobbing at the edges, bright with malice."

Atonement. Expiation. In the broken sunlight of an afternoon's carelessness, born of a shocking discovery and the end of a marriage, a woman lies lifeless in the road, her bicycle wheels spinning slowly to a stop. The driver, a doctor's wife who has chosen a leafy country road to return from a shopping excursion, cannot assimilate what has just happened. As she reaches for her cell phone, clutching a sheaf of the victim's papers swirling in a sudden gust, she changes her mind, throwing herself impulsively behind the wheel, leaving her victim alone, twittering birds anxiously hovering near the corpse. The driver is assaulted by mixed emotions: the irrefutable evidence of her husband's infidelity; the broken eggs and bleeding raspberries spilled on the plush upholstery of his bright yellow Saab convertible; the cracked windshield where Ruth Mitchell's sixty-one year old body slammed into the Saab. Safely inside her locked garage, the woman is frantic, smashing the car in helpless rage, her marriage in shambles, her life forever altered from the moment she struck the innocent bicycler. A shocked husband returns home to face a wife who cannot begin to articulate the events of the day, a day which will tumble into others, loosely taking form, an accidental intent to make impossible restitution: "Another day had got people in its crass and ruthless grip and was propelling them through the hours, using them up with things that didn't matter." From this stunning beginning, in prose that captures the essence of each shattering moment, the inevitable consequences of loss, a ticking time bomb of guilt and profound remorse, the world continues, oblivious to the momentousness of what has happened. The undefined, shadowy guilt subtly undermines the protagonist's every attempt to recapture a sense of normalcy. Infidelity is laughable, incongruous in the face of the greater issue, a lonely widower left to sort through the detritus of years of marriage. Not content to dwell on this one unforeseen happening, the author delves further into her characters via Ruth Mitchell's novel, "The Cold and the Beauty and the Dark", haunting letters a grief-stricken Arthur pens to his dead wife as he struggles to restructure a once orderly, well-cared for existence. The doctor's wife- who remains nameless- hovers at the edges, watching, her own delusions tainting her perceptions of Arthur's continuing anguish as he languishes without his wife's nurturing presence. There are stories within stories, unexpected connections that spread like the branches of trees, rooting the characters to a circular theme. The language of loss, of expiation and of yearning to erase the fateful event imbue this novel with melancholy beauty, the inexorable passage of time and the indifferent demands of fate. Luan Gaines/ 2008.