This book hit me right in the heart for so many different reasons. Starting with losing a loved one to cancer, switching to having a teacher that means everything to you, and ending with the idea that life will always work out the way that it's meant to.

Oh, the journey this book and I went on. I loved Booth/Harry! His moral code reminded me of early Dexter... but with less death ;) And despite it being published into 5 days into the New Year I have some confidence in predicting that this will be one of the quirkiest, most intelligent and idea-filled literary fiction (and definitely debut novels) published in 2023. The End of Nightwork’s apparently discursive style, moving from the mundane to the fantastical with dry humour and piercing observation, masks its clever interweaving of ideas: on how our physical bodies both define and belie who we are, the significance of age in political and social life, the power of cults to mobilise and persuade, how unreliable fragments of memory shape our identity as individuals, families and cultures. And those that said to me why art thou come into Towne to make divisions were answered not by mine tongue but by the Lord who promiseth such fire as will cuppell His creation. Since the last Days foretold and forewarn’d of by our Saviour, are at hand, wherein iniquity abounds, and the love of many waxes cold; hence Father against Son, and Son against Father, betraying one another, and hating one another; hence the Judgments of Famine and Pestilence; Nation rising up against Nation. So that the whole World seems to be on Fire before its time and the birds of the air will gather in the darkling sky and will tear out the eyes of the slaves of Sathan.’ An unsettling example of writer, prophet and protagonist collapsing into one character. Isao is a young nationalist militant. Obsessed with the historical account of a group of samurai who performed seppuku in the aftermath of a failed coup, Isao organises his own plot to assassinate a group of prominent capitalists. Arrested and imprisoned, Isao experiences a number of dream-visions in which he foresees his own death. In one he is killed by a venomous snake and at the same time has a realisation: “I was not meant to die like this. I was meant to die by cutting open my stomach.” At the novel’s conclusion, Isao assassinates the capitalist Kurahara and then performs seppuku. A year after the publication of Runaway Horses Mishima himself staged an ill-fated coup and followed suit.From mystics and soothsayers to madmen and mountebanks, prophets people many of my very favourite books and stories. Here are some of them. The bad guy LaPorte was an absolute idiot. NR can and has built extremely twisted villains, but sometimes, like The Witness with Russian mafia, these villains seem straight out of PatheticVille. If I have to hear about how scary and mean and cold a person is, I need to see my main character overcome problems and challenges on the way to best the bad guy. But there is absolutely none of that, which is ridiculous. Pol explains how this rare hormonal condition works: “What I had experienced, in very simple terms, was a kind of radically expedited pubescence. In the course of a few days, my body had decided to undertake the same task that most human bodies undertake over the course of a few years.” While the fashionable method of short, separated paragraph units sometimes impedes the prose, Pol’s understated wit is fine company The End of Nightwork takes the form of a memoir written by Pol for his young son, Jesse. Pol describes the difficult marriage between his German father and Irish mother and his obsession with 17th-century apocalyptic prophet Bartholomew Playfere. After Pol discovers Playfere through a lesson at school and a Ladybird book, he learns that his parents honeymooned on the same island in Connemara where Playfere led his people to wait for Armageddon (Playfere had identified it as the location due to a misunderstanding).

Harry is also just kind of blah. I also wasn't in the mood to root for a thief. I feel like a little bit this was a little of her trying to do another "Roarke" type character for her readers. We all know that Roarke started off stealing as a kid and of course got involved with criminal gangs in Ireland and then New York. Most of the dialogue and circumstances about him I think were supposed to read as thief with heart of gold, but I just kept rolling my eyes. Also Harry does have "relations" with other women in this book so when you get to the whole "heroine" in this one you wonder why it even matters. I will add that I think that most of the books where Nora just follows a "hero" it does not work as well for me, see my review of "Shelter in Place." Thanks to his love of acting and theatre, Booth is by now expert at switching identities, and escapes the country to avoid LaPorte’s further demands: he will not be owned. But he doubts this man will ever tire of his pursuit, and begins to long for a more settled existence: a job as an English/drama teacher in a mid-size town would fit the bill. And does, until someone who knows him arrives… Pol’s condition of course links to the Kourist/Hoarist conflict and Playfere’s prophecies to the risks of climate change – all interwoven with myriad generational conflicts, …….. but as I implied with my opening remarks the threads don’t form quite the completed tapestry I had hoped for. Having said that I would not necessarily say that it will be one of the best as I felt that the myriad of adjacent-ish ideas in it failed to completely coalesce by the end in the way that much of the novel seemed to promise. I finally had the time to read this book. And I ended up reading it in one sitting!!!!! It was SO GOOD!!!!!The fact that the lead male commits crimes might be difficult for some readers to accept easily. But Harry Booth is not your usual down and dirty thief. I know – I know -- you’re thinking that a crime is a crime and should not go unpunished. But it’s fiction! And it’s Nora Roberts!! And the writing is marvelous!!! And the story equally so!!!! Harry winds his leisurely way, as Silas Booth, to New Orleans, learning, always learning, discovering new things, making good friends and continuing to pay his way with a little nightwork. When a fence put him in touch with an accomplished thief, he ends up stealing a Turner sunset. The client insists on meeting him, but Silas is wary of the offer this privileged but greedy man makes. a focus on caring, particularly for someone who ages faster than their partner, and the inter-generation burdens of care; What really didn’t work for me was how events were glossed over and we would skip forward in time so when I feel like I’d start to immerse we'd jump somewhere else. I feel I’m being told, not shown most of the time. Pol escapes his weird family when he meets Caroline, a “debonair” violinist. The attraction is instant and mutual and the couple marry in their early twenties. By then, Pol is researching Bartholomew Playfere, a fictional 17th-century Puritan who prophesised ecological disaster. The couple spend their honeymoon on the small Irish island which Playfere said would be the only place where you could survive the apocalypse.

At the 57% mark it got slightly better because we stayed in one location for a longer period of time, but by that time I just wanted to finish this. However, the plot took an unexpected turn, it was something I’d expect in a rom com. I do think that nightwork is like magic, isn’t it,’ Ellen is saying. ‘The same quality of experience. Like little magic elves making you think that the whole thing was just a dream.’ At the climax of this story, a misanthropic and judgmental Tennessean grandmother pleads with an antinomian serial killer – the Misfit – for her life. She appeals to his sense of decency but the Misfit is concerned with a higher form of goodness than charity, and a lower form of evil than murder. With her last breath the grandmother blesses the Misfit unawares: “You’re one of my babies,” she says. “You’re one of my own children.” After the grandmother’s death, he muses that “she would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” O’Connor described the Misfit as a “prophet gone wrong”. For just one divine minute, through communion with the Misfit, the grandmother is transported out of her homespun hypocrisy and into a universe of grace.

Wow, what a great character! At the age of nine, Harry Booth's mother has cancer. She owns a cleaning service with her sister, Mags. When she was too ill to work, Harry goes with his aunt, but it wasn't enough for her medical bills, he was worried about foreclosure. Without her knowing, Harry starts going into homes and taking small things. He never takes more than what he needs and he never "breaks" into a home. From the get-go, Harry has a code of conduct. I just wish there was more of this, and less "dropped", random details that are supposed to help brush a picture of who the characters are, but end up like reference dropping. For example, all the music bands Caroline loves didn't help me understand her as a person. So I wish that what felt expandable in the story had been replaced by more details about mythology, philosophy, and more existential ponderings diving into the main character's condition. For me, the sign of an awesome author is one who changes the tide of the story with such subtlety that you do not even realize it is happening. Pol and his wife, Caroline, also travel there for their honeymoon before settling to married life. Pol’s medical condition (and frankly, his temperament) mean he doesn’t have a career so his work on Playfere becomes his identity, allowing him to claim status, intellect and purpose to their friends. He works as a tutor to Cynthia, a young disabled artist and activist, and she inspires his increasing fascination with a present-day movement, the Kourists, whose manifesto of intergenerational conflict is refined and discussed on Reddit. For Cottrell-Boyce, who stood as a parliamentary candidate for the Green Party while completing his PhD in Divinity, Pol’s condition and interests are a means by which to explore themes of climate crisis and the political differences between generations.

We grow up with Booth Will Damron was just about perfect in his storytelling and characterizations. I particularly liked how his female voices sounded normal, not affected like some male narrators tend to go. It’s a long story and his voice tone made the time fly by. He’s got serious skills. It is hard to pin down what this book is at times, but the core premise of the book, and the de-ageing process, sits alongside some very interesting and weird asides, but was very singular in a fascinating way. This is a distinctive novel, combining chronic illness, family, philosophical thought, and what gives people meaning. The story itself, narrated by Pol to his child, focuses on Pol's life and the tensions in his marriage due to his condition and general relation to the world, in terms of thought and action. There's a theme running underneath about Pol's relation to knowledge-making as someone who is trying to write non-fiction without a university degree and who is seen as someone who knows everything whilst being self-taught. There's also a notable generational element to the book, not only in the obvious youth movement, but also relationships between parents and children and the perceptions of Pol when he appears to be different ages to what he really is.

Aidan Cottrell-Boyce's debut novel The End of Nightwork is a witty, deft examination of the body as a site of trauma and change

They're happy enough, even if having a young child has put something of a strain on their marriage. And the “ideas and life” thing is true. The story of Pol (Polonius) and his family is indeed told in a way that is refreshing to read: well observed, clever dialogue (the girls in this book get some great lines!) and some great descriptive writing. There are also all the ideas about Bartholomew Playfere, the Kourists. The Playfere prophecies lead onto stuff about potential climate change, rising sea levels etc.. The Kourists, when you read about them (I’ll leave that for you to do rather than go into detail) set up an environment in which they and Pol’s condition (explained in the blurb) can bounce ideas around.