Synopses & Reviews
As a child, Beverly Rabinowitz fled Europe with her mother during World War II. Almost half a century later, while she is vacationing in Florida, a chance encounter leads to a strangely lucid moment in which she senses that her father, long believed to have been killed during the war, is close by. It's the first of many seemingly random events that are guiding her toward a startling discovery.
In the course of Frederick Reiken's provocative, intricate novel, Beverly will learn that her story is part of something larger. Because the story is not hers alone--it's also the story of a comatose teenage boy in Utah, an elusive sixties-era fugitive, an FBI agent pursuing a twenty-year obsession, a Massachusetts veterinarian who falls in love on a kibbutz in Israel, and a host of other characters. DAY FOR NIGHT illuminates how disparate, far-flung people can be connected, and how the truth of those bonds can upend entire lives. Each chapter is a small universe of its own, and together they form a dazzling whole.
Review
"[A]n intricate, subtly fantastic, six-degrees-of-separation tale....[A]n entrancing and profoundly complicated tale...[Reiken] slowly reveals the submerged connections among his intriguing characters while sustaining psychological sophistication, suspense, shrewd humor, and many-tiered compassion." Booklist (starred review)
Review
"Brilliant plotting, haunting characters and an elegiac tone distinguish this dazzling novel....Contemporary fiction at its best — accessible, breathtaking and heartbreaking." Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Review
"[An] excellent novel....[A] beautiful test in patience, but by the end, you'll see it was worth the wait." The Very Short List
Synopsis
If you look hard enough into the history of anything, you will discover things that seem to be connected but are not. So claims a character in Frederick Reiken's wonderful, surprising novel, which seems in fact to be determined to prove just the opposite. How else to explain the threads that link a middle-aged woman on vacation in Florida with a rock and roll singer visiting her comatose brother in Utah, where he's been transported after a motorcycle injury in Israel, where he works with a man whose long-lost mother, in a retirement community in New Jersey, recognizes him in a televised report about an Israeli-Palestinian skirmish? And that's not the half of it.
In Day for Night, critically acclaimed writer Frederick Reiken spins an unlikely and yet utterly convincing story about people lost and found. They are all refugees from their own lives or history's cruelties, and yet they wind up linked to each other in compelling and unpredictable ways that will keep you guessing until the very end.
Synopsis
The prize-winning author of The Odd Sea and The Lost Legends of New Jersey offers this dazzling and moving novel about a family's mysterious past.
About the Author
Frederick Reiken is the author of two previous novels, The Odd Sea (1998) and The Lost Legends of New Jersey (2000). His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker and his essays in the anthology Living on the Edge of the World (2008). He has worked as a reporter and columnist and is currently a member of the writing faculty at Emerson College.