The Night Child
A Novel
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The Night Child
Buy Now for £10.99
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Narrated by:
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Cassandra Campbell
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By:
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Anna Quinn
About this listen
Exquisitely nuanced and profoundly intimate, The Night Child is a story of resilience, hope, and the capacity of the mind, body, and spirit to save itself despite all odds.
Nora Brown teaches high school English and lives a quiet life in Seattle with her husband and six-year-old daughter. But one November day, moments after dismissing her class, a girl’s face appears above the students’ desks—“a wild numinous face with startling blue eyes, a face floating on top of shapeless drapes of purples and blues where arms and legs should have been. Terror rushes through Nora’s body—the kind of raw terror you feel when there’s no way out, when every cell in your body, your entire body, is on fire—when you think you might die.”
Twenty-four hours later, while on Thanksgiving vacation, the face appears again. Shaken and unsteady, Nora meets with neurologists and eventually, a psychiatrist. As the story progresses, a terrible secret is discovered—a secret that pushes Nora toward an even deeper psychological breakdown.
This breathtaking debut novel examines the impact of traumatic childhood experiences and the fragile line between past and present.
©2018 Anna Quinn (P)2018 Blackstone Audio, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
Heartbreakingly unputdownable, loved it.
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I so very nearly gave up on this!
I found it very hard to get into & got as far as writing a review based on only being able to get to chapter 8, but I came back to it another day & started again.
It wasn’t easy going (subject matter, the narrator & probably also the way it’s written) but once I got into it, I found myself enjoying it.
I agree it shouldn’t be so hard to ‘get into’ a book, & the repetition of words & phrases really got on my nerves – I don’t think it added anything to the story at all, it just became grating. I get that Margaret was traumatised, but we didn’t need to hear her counting to ten FIVE times, or to hear the phone’s ringing actually being voiced ‘Brrrrring brrrring brrring’.
The Irish accents were particularly terrible & the over dramatic voices weren’t endearing – but they were supposed to be traumatised people so…
That said, I can see why it’s written the way it is. It is essentially going through therapy with Nora / Margaret, & really does a good job of highlighting how much damage child abuse causes & how we can disassociate from traumatic events.
I’m glad I listened to it but there’s no doubt that this isn’t a book you can just pick up & fall into.
Hard going but eventually worth it.
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insightful
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Very insightful
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The pain, the edginess, the rawness came through clearly. This is a book filled with trauma but it is also a story of triumph, of love and hope.
An amazing first novel
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