Synopses & Reviews
ALL DAYS ARE NIGHT is the story of Gillian, a successful and beautiful woman. Married and working a dream job in television as a presenter and cultural correspondent after years of drama school, Gillian has her life entirely under control, until the night a car crash irrevocably shatters her world. Her husband is killed and her once beautiful face is disfigured. Forced to confront an existence without the face she's known for, she must put her life back together and somehow turn her tragedy into a story of new beginnings.
With the spare and unadorned prose he is known for, Stamm examines beauty, pain, love, and reawakening--life in its rawest form--with honesty and empathy.
(Praise continued)
"Stamm is a master of quietly deliberative stories. In Seven Years, as in the best of his work, he puts often simple-seeming characters through extraordinary paces, all the more remarkable given the Carver-like restraint he exercises in his writing." --Bookforum
"With a patient and impressive commitment to realism, this Swiss novel follows the course of a complicated, troubled marriage...Though Stamm pulls off a quietly spectacular plot twist halfway through the book, he never loses sight of the quotidian things that erode or transform relationships over time: an oddly personal disagreement about the merits of 'Rain Man', or the 'piles of romance novels, Christian manuals, and Polish magazines' that crowd a lover's apartment." --The New Yorker
"Seven Years is a powerful, enlightening novel about the eternal search for contentment in life, the often fickle nature of love, and the knowledge that in reality, happiness is rarely how we dreamed it would be." --The Daily Beast
Synopsis
A novel about survival, self-reliance, and art, by Peter Stamm, finalist for the 2013 Man Booker International Prize
All Days Are Nightis the story of Gillian, a successful and beautiful TV host, content with her marriage to Matthias, even if she feels restless at times. One night following an argument, the couple has a terrible car accident: Matthias, who is drunk, hits a deer on the wet road and dies in the crash. Gillian wakes up in the hospital completely disfigured. Only slowly, after many twists and turns, does she put her life back together, and reconnects with a love interest of the past who becomes a possible future or so it seems. In Stamm s unadorned and haunting style, this new novel forcefully tells the story of a woman who loses her life but must stay alive all the same. How she works everything out in the end is at once surprising and incredibly rewarding.
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Synopsis
Peter Stamm is the author of the novels
Seven Years,
On a Day Like This, and
Unformed Landscape, and the short-story collections
We’re Flying and
In Strange Gardens and Other Stories. His prize-winning books have been translated into more than thirty languages. For his entire body of work and his accomplishments in fiction, he was short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize in 2013, and in 2014 he won the prestigious Friedrich Hölderlin Prize. He lives in Switzerland.
Michael Hofmann has translated the work of Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth, and Peter Stephan Jungk. He is the author of several books of poems and a book of essays, Behind the Lines, and is the editor of the anthology Twentieth-Century German Poetry. In 2012 he was awarded the Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Florida and London. The author lives in Zurich, Switzerland.