The End of Nightwork

Product Information

The title comes from "The End of Nightwork and the Sundering of the Curtain in Twayn", Playfere's most famous work, but there are other references, some implicit (looking after a child overnight) and other's more explicit - an Irish relative who comes over to do nightwork on the Jubilee Line; "nightwork" used rather oddly as putting in effort to keep a family together; and passages like this: 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. This one just wasn't for me :(. I want to feel conflicted about rooting for a morally grey character but I just didn't feel anything for Booth. So of you do like him, then this could be a winner for you! He tenido algun problemilla con el libro, hay partes que se me han hecho lentas, y por otro lado, me parecía increíble que jamás hayan pillado a Booth después de más de 20 años robando.

When speaking with the Augury,’ McCaul wrote, ‘I have the curious sensation that I am speaking to Ebenezer Scrooge. Her childhood and her adulthood are not lifetimes. They are, rather, prophetic episodes, episodes in a sad and sadly limited sequence.’ The End of Nightwork is a novel to savour, poignant and quietly devastating. I kept turning it over in my mind after I had finished reading it, and the more I thought about it, the more I saw.It was interesting, and perhaps a little unfairly detrimental on The End of Nightwork to read this after the powerful Ti amo told by a narrator caring for her husband dying of cancer, which covers this topic much more powerfully.

The prophet at the heart of Tressell’s masterpiece is Frank, a socialist agitator who spends most of the novel trying and failing to rouse the slumbering lions of labour. We and he can see what has gone wrong in the penury-stalked world of unfettered, early 20th-century capitalism. But his fellow characters – mainly – cannot. Owen leaves the scene at the end of the novel to seek more fertile ground for his message. It ends, however, with a remarkably eschatological epilogue: “Mankind … is at last looking upward to the light… that will be diffused throughout all the happy world from the rays of the risen sun of Socialism.” a focus on caring, particularly for someone who ages faster than their partner, and the inter-generation burdens of care;

Advance Praise

The second is that NOTHING GOES WRONG, not even a single major hiccup. Everything came together TOO seamlessly. I felt in suspense, but then nothing even happened. 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. 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). Forgotten the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Visit BookSleuth La Porte didn’t feel like the dangerous villain of the story that he was meant to be. Their first meeting and conflict wasn’t intense enough for me to feel like Booth needed to fear La Porte and live his life in hiding. I just didn’t feel the danger or urgency. When Booth was forced to do a job I thought there would be more time spent on the heist and having to leave his life behind but it was breezed through.

From mystics and soothsayers to madmen and mountebanks, prophets people many of my very favourite books and stories. Here are some of them. Now, my problem with too expansive stories - a huge range of time, too many events, too many places, too many people but not enough character building. Or at least not enough of it words, which is what counts here. I could guess a lot of this guy's character building was there - under the surface - because he had to repress all his feelings to get his 'nightwork' done in tne beginning, and this repression ended up being a survival technique. But having to guess something like this feels like being shortchanged. 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. 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.Caster Semenya’s The Race to Be Myself made me gasp 31 October, 2023 Fantasy books used to bore me - my kids changed my mind 30 October, 2023 Opinion | Jilly Cooper will never be too old to write sex scenes 27 October, 2023