WHAT HAPPENS AT NIGHT BY PETER CAMERON
Paperback published by Europa Editions 26th August 2021
ISBN 9781787703216
A couple travels to a snowy European city to adopt a baby, who they hope will resurrect their failing marriage. Their difficult journey leaves the wife, who is struggling with cancer, desperately weak, and her husband worries her illness will prevent the orphanage from releasing their child. The couple check into the cavernous, eerily deserted Borgarfjaroaysla Grand Imperial Hotel where the bar is always open and the restaurant serves thirteen course dinners from centuries past. Their attempt to claim their baby is both helped and hampered by the people they encounter: a flamboyant chanteuse, a debauched businessman, an enigmatic faith healer, and a stoic bartender who dispenses addictive, linchen-flavoured schnapps. Nothing is as it seems in this mysterious, frozen world and the longer the couple endure the punishing cold the less they seem to know about their marriage, themselves, and life itself.
MY FAVOURITE LINES FROM PAGES 67 & 68
The man and the woman said nothing to each other in the taxi on the way to the orphanage. The sky was no longer night-dark, but it remained completely covered with low, densely opaque clouds. They sat close to the doors on either side of the car and left an expanse of seat empty between them, and both watched out their separate windows at the white fields passing by. The taxi was driven by the same man who had brought them to Brother Emmanuel’s but no one alluded to this prior journey they had made together. The taxi retracted its original route back into the town, through the narrow streets, past the hotel, and then crossed over a bridge that spanned a frozen river into the countryside that mirrored that on the city’s opposite flank. They traveled about a mile in this direction and then the taxi pulled off the road and stopped in front of a two-story building that looked like a school. It’s large windows were symmetrical arranged across its facade, which was covered in yellowish plaster that was, in several places, peeling away in large strips, revealing a wall of cinder blocks. The driver turned around and said, Orphanage and pointed at the building.
Peter Cameron (b. 1959) is an award-winning novelist and short story writer. Born in Pompton Plains, New Jersey, he moved to New York City after graduating college in 1982. Cameron began publishing stories in the New Yorker one year later. His numerous award-winning stories for that magazine led to the publication of his first book, One Way or Another (1986), which received a special citation for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for a First Book of Fiction. He has since focused on writing novels, including Leap Year (1990) and The City of Your Final Destination (2002), which was a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist. Cameron lives in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. https://www.peter-cameron.com/
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