Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
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Fiction & Related items

THE ALL NIGHT SUN

Diane Zinna

A lonely professor gets too close to her charismatic female student in this poignant, propulsive debut that delivers a new take on the coming-of-age novel.

Lauren Cress teaches writing in the international program at a small college outside of Washington D.C. Int the classrom, she is smart and kind, well-liked by her students. But in private, she is troubled and alone. Grappling with the death of her parents ten years ago, she lives in frozen time as a grieving teenager. Then, a new student arrives: magnetic Siri. She is everything Lauren wants to be. They fall headlong into an all-consuming freidnship and Lauren sees a chance to reclaim her lost adolescence.

When Lauren accepts Siri's invotation to a trip home to Sweden for the summer, Lauren is drawn to Siri's brother Magnus. Siri gets selfish and cruel. On the last night her trip during Midsummer Night's eve, things take a dark turn and Lauren must acknowledge the truth of her relationship with Siri.

Diane Zinna is the deputy executive director of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs. She has worked with authors like Claire Messud, Roxane Gay, and Alice Sebold. She received her MFA from the University of Florida and taught creative writing for ten years. She lives in Fairfax, Virginia, with her husband and daughter.

Available products
Book Published 2020-08-04 by Random House
Book Published 2020-08-04 by Random House

Comments

Inventive and luminous ... Zinna's intimate debut dazzles with original language, emotional sentience, and Swedish folklore as it plumbs the depths of grief, loss, and friendship [and] reaches an inspired emotional depth that, as the title signifies, never stops blazing.

The All-Night Sun illuminates the unwieldy paths the human mind will follow when chased by grief, loneliness, and the failure of memory. In lyrical, dreamlike prose, Diane Zinna's mångata leads her characters from profound loss to the promise of wounds healed. An impressive debut by a gifted writer.

This stunning debut novel explores the space between dreams and nightmares, life and death, the brilliance of the midnight sun and the darkness when you shut your eyes. Diane Zinna has given us a tender, aching, and unforgettable story.

The All-Night Sun is about loss, guilt, faith, friendship, and, as the title also suggests, the human ability to go on. Zinna offers everything I come to a novel hoping fora compelling protagonist, graceful prose, first-rate storytelling, and deep compassion for her characters.

Diane Zinna has written a mesmerizing story of how grief can pull us together while pulling us under. She is a writer deft with a paintbrush of words illustrating the dark hues of the deepest emotions. Her brilliant story is the heartfelt tale of Lauren and Siri, both orphans with pain shadowing their futures, which sends them on a journey together. Throughout the novel, we never quit wondering if they or their friendship will survive. The All-Night Sun is a gorgeous tribute to grief in all its forms, and how we have to go through it to get to the other sidethere's no way around it.

Sensuous and hypnotic, The All-Night Sun reveals the many ways in which grief can distort one's judgement and even one's allegiance to the truth. Diane Zinna has gifted an empathic prose-poem to anyone who has felt displaced by loss and in search of a path out of the stalemate of memory.

The All-Night Sun is a testament to the power of storytelling. In much the same way that she pursues her emptiness across an ocean, the rawness of Lauren's pain will have readers chasing her through the pages. The lies she tells herselfand othersabout her past become the ghosts which simultaneously accuse and exonerate her. As she unravels and cuts through the tangles of her experience, we can't help but cheer.

A mesmerizing, disturbing, and heart-wrenching read about loneliness and grief. Diane Zinna writes sentences that will break you, and then suddenly everything on the page lights up again, and you go on the rollercoaster that is love, and loss, and life. With poetic and hypnotic prose, The All-Night Sun is an essential addition to fiction on grief and a compelling story about female friendship, its limits and constraints, and the surprising ways it can make us whole.

Vividly imagined ... Ultimately, what's illuminated ... in The All-Night Sun is the thorny, surreal nature of grief, both new and old, and the twisting path forward after loss.

In The All-Night Sun, Diane Zinna displays her deep understanding of the writing craft ... Her stunning debut novel is a twisting tale of grief, hope and self-deceit, a story as mesmerizing as the young women at its heart.