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ALL OTHER
NIGHTS
a novel by Dara Horn
Now Available in Paperback
Reviews
(Links to the full reviews
are provided if available)
"In the slam-bang opening pages of her superb third novel, Dara Horn
masterfully establishes both a gripping plot premise and a fascinatingly
conflicted protagonist. She sends Jacob roaming across a war-torn landscape to
encounter a marvelous variety of characters, each imagined with empathy and
depth. .... Horn is too gifted and ambitious an artist to settle for easy
reassurances or a facile happy ending; she instead offers her readers the deeper
satisfactions of complexity and generosity as she limns a world of agonizing,
implacable moral ambiguities and guides her imperfect yet lovable protagonist
toward a tentative redemption."
Washington
Post
"Would
you bump off a relative for a good cause? A really good cause — say, ending
slavery? Horn’s engrossing third novel forces readers to contemplate such
awkward questions. . . . A love story naturally ensues, replete with intercepted
letters, fantastic coincidences and miraculous escapes. These implausible
twists, in Horn’s skillful hands, are not only forgivable — they’re
delicious. The war supplies the motifs for Horn’s themes: the meanings of
freedom (not all slaves are physically in chains); the tension between
commitment to a cause and allegiance to family."
The
New York Times Books Review (Editors' Choice)
"A Civil War spy page-turner meets an exploration of race and
religion in 19th-century America in Horn's enthralling latest. . . . Horn
propels the story at a thriller's pace; the mix of love and loyalty played
out in a divided America is sublime."
Publisher's Weekly (starred review)
"A
complex, multilayered, and thoroughly involving historical novel.
Horn both unearths a fascinating, relatively unexplored aspect of American
history—the role of Jewish Americans in the Civil War—and delivers a novel
rich in human emotion and ambiguity. A triumph."
Booklist
(starred review)
"An enjoyably fast-paced amalgam of historical romance, spy novel and political thriller
. . . . a rare and memorable portrait of Jewish life during the Civil War."
The
Wall Street Journal
"Welcome to Dara Horn's stellar third novel. . . . All Other
Nights has the propulsive, suspenseful narrative of an espionage
thriller, but the novel stands out because of the larger moral dilemmas
Horn weaves into an epic."
The
New York Post
"Dara
Horn is an astonishing storyteller. One of her greatest talents is for weaving
personal tales into the sweeping current of real historical events. . . . Horn
employs every method to keep readers irresistibly hooked-- from chapter
cliffhangers to delicious teasers. . . But her most effective device is
characterisation. Jacob is recognisably human in his self-doubt and vacillation.
. . . [P]erhaps, as Horn seems to suggest in this extraordinary novel,
redemption is possible after all – as long as wretches like Jacob are free to
make new, and better, choices."
The
Financial Times
"All
Other Nights is such an apparent departure from Dara Horn's previous work
that when I learned what Horn was writing, I thought she might not be able to
bring it off. I should have known better. . . . [Jacob's] mission, and the
idea of bitter-end faithfulness to an extreme, delusional cause, suggest the
Joseph Conrad of The Secret Agent and Under
Western Eyes. . . . For a writer as young as Horn to be compared with
Conrad shows what kind of league she's playing in. And she plays in it with a
skill well beyond her years."
The
Baltimore Sun
"The complex world of
[Judah] Benjamin and other Jewish Americans during the Civil War is chronicled in Dara Horn's vibrant and compelling third novel,
'All Other Nights,' which examines the tenuous relationships of American Jewish spies -- between each other, to their religion and to their country -- during the Civil War."
The
Los Angeles Times
"[The
book's] ultimate success stems from its religious
underpinnings. Its symbolic withdrawals are underwritten by the gold of the
biblical narrative. Those resonances - the parallels Horn draws between those
slaves and these, between the redeemer of the Old Testament and His manifold
successors - give the novel a richness and vigor often lacking in contemporary
fiction about this country’s bloodiest war."
The
Boston Globe
"Horn,
the award-winning author of The World To Come, has written a stunning
historical novel that will challenge readers' preconceptions. . . . Her
tale of Confederate Hebrew spies skillfully puts a new spin on a time period
that has been researched and written about extensively."
Library
Journal
"Riveting
. . . . written in meticulous but energetic prose ... All Other Nights
interrogates and celebrates nationhood and freedom. . . . Conflating
Jewish and American history, Horn’s third and most accomplished novel portrays
Passover, the festival of freedom, amid the carnage caused by slavery. Horn’s
lively, timely tale extends the range of American Jewish literature beyond
familiar themes of immigration, assimilation and extermination."
The
Forward
"A tale of adventure that weaves the Civil War and the Jews of the
North and South together in a web of betrayal and love, dignity and loss, that
takes the breath away and makes the heart pound."
Anne Roiphe
The World to Come
a novel by Dara Horn
New York Times Book Review Editor's
Choice * Entertainment Weekly Editor's Choice
A Book-of-the
Month Club Smart Readers Selection * A Book Sense
Pick
Winner of the 2006 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction
Winner of the 2007 Harold U. Ribalow Prize
Reviews
(Links to the full reviews
are provided if available)
"Nothing short of amazing."
Entertainment
Weekly (Editor's Choice)
"Throughout this rich,
complex and haunting novel, Horn reminds us that our world poses constant
threats to the artist and to art, to the individual and the creative spirit.
Their very survival is a miracle."
New
York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice)
"A deeply satisfying literary mystery and a funny-sad meditation on how the
past haunts the present—and how we haunt the future."
Time Magazine
"Piercingly beautiful...
delightful and often funny... Almost romantic, almost tragic, almost
comic, almost mystical -- the novel suspends us between emotions, never allowing
any to become predominant, and we hang there in that indeterminate space,
perfectly happy, hoping that the book will never end."
Newsday
"Captivating and
startling... miraculously, it stays aloft in the mind like a dream you can't
decide was sweet or frightening."
The
Washington Post
"A deeply involving tale, a
family saga and a mystery... brilliantly imagined... The novel may sound
over-ambitious -- pogrom and privation, familial and romantic love, life after
death (and before), not to mention high art and quiz shows. And yet it all
seems to work -- beautifully."
The Wall Street Journal
"Isn't there a Willy Wonka
gum that tastes like all good foods at once? If so, Dara Horn's "The World
to Come" is the literary equivalent of that confection, equal parts
mystery, sprawling novel, folktale, philosophical treatise, history, biography,
love story and fabulist adventure... each page of her novel is a marvel."
The
San Francisco Chronicle (Editor's
Recommendation)
"Compelling and luxuriously
layered... perfectly paced... wryly funny... an accomplished work that
beautifully explains how families -- in all their maddening, smothering,
supportive glory -- create us."
Los
Angeles Times
"Horn's roving, kinetic
imagination and storytelling talent are on abundant display here, and there's no
question that this book is the real thing."
Chicago
Tribune
"Oh, what a story... a
lament for what has been lost and an invitation to seek out what remains."
Detroit Free Press
"Horn’s prose sallies
along with confidence and intensity, sometimes to the point of whimsy, which
means that the novel is, by turns, profoundly bleak and fantastically sweet...
The World to Come is the stuff of dreams, enchanting and daring ...
[Horn] has a spiritual and moral intuition that transcends most of her
contemporaries. This is no mean feat — especially since she combines it with a
flair for fantastical storytelling."
The
Times of London
"Horn, a ridiculously
accomplished novelist for a 29-year-old, takes the real-life disappearance of
the Chagall as the framework for this outstanding, ethereal second novel ...
What she has to say about what truly matters in life - what is real versus what
is fake, what we choose to remember versus what we forget - is nothing short of
inspirational."
The
Observer (U.K.)
"Just when all the stories
were heading towards their resolution, Horn does something so bold and so pure
that to describe it would spoil it. All I can say is that you have to read
it."
The
Guardian (U.K.)
"Like Chagall's paintings,
the novel is steeped in Jewish Russian folklore. Warm and humorous, it is also
drenched in the melancholy that attaches itself to the history of 19th and 20th
century Jewish
culture. Underpinned by exquisite reflections on loss, beauty and identity, it
is perhaps one of the most outstanding novels published so far this year."
Financial
Times
"Spellbinding . . . A compelling
collage of history, mystery, theology, and scripture, The World to Come is a narrative tour de force crackling with conundrums and dark truths."
Booklist (*Starred Review*)
"[The World to Come] reads
like a dynamic hybrid of Nicole Krauss's The History of Love and Milan
Kundera's philosophical flights of fancy. . . . This is intelligent,
compelling literary fiction."
Library Journal
"With surety and accomplishment, [Dara] Horn
telescopes out into familial history through an exploration of Chagall's life;
that of Chagall's friend the Yiddish novelist Der Nister; 1920s Soviet Russia
and its horrific toll on Russian Jews; the nullifying brutality of Vietnam and
the paradoxes of American suburbia. Horn expertly handles subplots and
digressions, neatly bringing in everything from Yiddish lore to Nebuchadnezzar, Da
Nang, the Venice
Biennale, recent theories of child development, brutal Soviet politics and
[Ben's] job as a writer for fictional TV show American Genius . . . . which Horn
then unites with a much grander place that
furnishes the book's title."
Publishers Weekly (*Starred Review*)
"An engrossing adventure."
Kirkus Reviews
"I can't even count the ways I admire
The World to Come -- everything about the book intoxicated me. It is quite
simply an astonishing achievement, and Dara Horn is the realist of real
things. I suspect it'll be a long while before I again read a book as true
as The World to Come."
Steve Stern, author of
The Angel of Forgetfulness
"Like a spider
weaving her web -- miraculously -- Dara Horn weaves the poignant stories of
lives past, lives present, and lives to come in this splendid tale of
storytelling itself. A terrific yarn peopled with tender and very human
characters, a page-turning mystery of the best sort: not who done it, but
why."
Binnie Kirshenbaum, author of
An Almost Perfect Moment
"Some excellent books are smart and
serious; others are sweet and joyous. Amazingly, Dara Horn's The World to
Come is all of the above. Ms. Horn hits every note in the literary
register from historical tragedy to mystical delirium, and plays them like a
master."
Melvin Jules
Bukiet, author of Strange Fire and A Faker's Dozen
Now
available everywhere books are sold.
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