A REFINERY29 ‘BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR’

“Like a Kafka story and a Wes Anderson movie combined.”—LitHub

“[A] beautifully eerie tale of desire and death.”—Refinery29

AN UNFORGETTABLE NOVEL CONFRONTING LOVE, DEATH, AND OUR INADEQUACY YET PERSISTANCE IN THE FACE OF BOTH

An 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.

The couple check into a cavernous and eerily deserted 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, and 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.

For readers of Ian McEwan, Elizabeth Strout, and Iris Murdoch, What Happens at Night is a masterpiece poised on the cusp of reality.

“Peter Cameron’s What Happens at Night is a surreal, funny, heartbreaking story about love and mortality. Cameron’s sense of balance between the comic and the catastrophic, between cynicism and sincerity, is astonishing. This book reminds me of nothing else I’ve ever read, which is high praise indeed.”
—Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours and The Snow Queen

“The prose in What Happens at Night is faultlessly elegant and quietly menacing, like a tuxedo lined with knives. I can’t think of another book at once so beautiful and so unnerving, so poised between miracle and disaster. Peter Cameron is one of America’s greatest writers, the living stylist I most revere.”
—Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You and Cleanness

“A virtuosic tale that is by turns terrifying, comic, and heartbreaking. We do not always know whether we are in the realm of the real or the hallucinatory in this thrillingly mysterious and gorgeously written novel. What is never in doubt is that we are in the hands of a ravishing stylist and a supremely gifted storyteller.”
—Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend

“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

Peter Cameron
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. He lives in New York City and Vermont.