Something of the Night - Softcover

Marchant, Ian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1847397794 ISBN 13: 9781847397799

Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK, 2013

Synopsis

Who can say what the night might bring?

Mummy tucking you up with Teddy and a cup of Ovaltine? Fireworks and frivolity? A party? Music? Dancing? Or you could be reading in bed, between clean linen sheets before falling into deep and restful sleep and sweet dreams. And who knows; the night might bring romance, or love, or sex, if you play your cards right. Or you might be working; millions of people work at night. If nobody worked at night, Britain would cease to function. Or the night might be cold, haunted, inhuman and wild. When you look up into the night sky, you see that you are nothing. An insignificant mote of dust.

Or the night could be all too human. Hen parties in skimpy dresses and fairy wings being slammed into the back of a police van; girls working on street corners in the part of town where the lights don't come on; businessmen going to lap-dancing clubs to forget what waits at home.

Or you could die. Most people do die at night. Or you could just lie awake and wait for the dawn.

Set over the course of an intoxicated night in a house up a mountain in West Cork, Ian Marchant offers a darkly funny account of what people get up to at night, explores his own experience of a life of night times, and shows us how we all have something of the night about us.

About this title

Review

It s reminiscent of Nick Hornby or Bill Bryson if you like those writers you ll love Marchant but somehow less needy than Hornby and less reliant on the joke than Bryson. It looks as though it risks being a self-indulgent mess but it isn t. Marchant somehow carries us through all this, with patience, good humour, self-lacerating honesty and an immense amount of charm. I don t see how anyone could fail to like it --Evening Standard

The book proves its worth by offering up a shared emotional understanding of what the night can bring --Scottish Sunday Herald

Is January the darkest month of the year? It certainly feels like it, which gives you a very good excuse to stay inside and read this witty and wide-ranging discussion of the world through the eyes of night owl polymath (writer, musician, lecturer) Ian Marchant... this is an incredibly funny and well written outpouring of one man s life lived according to his own principles, both in daylight and at night --Resident magazine

About the Author

Ian Marchant is a writer, broadcaster and performer. He is originally from Newhaven in East Sussex, and now lives with his family in the not-entirely real county of Radnorshire. Before taking up writing books, he sang in various unimaginably obscure bands, wrote up the results of horse races in betting shops and ran a large second-hand bookshop on the Charing Cross Road. He currently teaches creative writing at Birmingham City University and with the National Academy of Writing. Something of the Night is his seventh book.

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1847397794
• ISBN 13: 9781847397799
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304