Our Share of Night - BookWyrm.World

English language

Published April 3, 2023 by Granta Books.

ISBN:: 978-1-78378-822-4

A woman’s mysterious death puts her husband and son on a collision course with her demonic family.

A young father and son set out on a road trip, devastated by the death of the wife and mother they both loved. United in grief, the pair travel to her ancestral home, where they must confront the terrifying legacy she has bequeathed: a family called the Order that commits unspeakable acts in search of immortality.

For Gaspar, the son, this maniacal cult is his destiny. As the Order tries to pull him into their evil, he and his father take flight, attempting to outrun a powerful clan that will do anything to ensure its own survival. But how far will Gaspar’s father go to protect his child? And can anyone escape their fate?

Moving back and forth in time, from London in the swinging 1960s to the brutal years …

A woman’s mysterious death puts her husband and son on a collision course with her demonic family.

A young father and son set out on a road trip, devastated by the death of the wife and mother they both loved. United in grief, the pair travel to her ancestral home, where they must confront the terrifying legacy she has bequeathed: a family called the Order that commits unspeakable acts in search of immortality.

For Gaspar, the son, this maniacal cult is his destiny. As the Order tries to pull him into their evil, he and his father take flight, attempting to outrun a powerful clan that will do anything to ensure its own survival. But how far will Gaspar’s father go to protect his child? And can anyone escape their fate?

Moving back and forth in time, from London in the swinging 1960s to the brutal years of Argentina’s military dictatorship and its turbulent aftermath, Our Share of Night is a novel like no other: a family story, a ghost story, a story of the occult and the supernatural, a book about the complexities of love and longing with queer subplots and themes. This is the masterwork of one of Latin America’s most original novelists, “a mesmerizing writer,” says Dave Eggers, “who demands to be read.”

2 editions

el dang reviewed Our Share of Night by Megan McDowell

Come into my parlour, said the spider to the fly

5 stars

Content warning relatively minor setting spoilers

This is one of those books that took over my head at times, and I'll be thinking about for a long while after finishing it.

Before I say any more, general content warnings for the book itself: there is a lot of gruesome violence, and particularly physical and sexual abuse of children in here. Some of the violence is what I understand to be realistic descriptions of Argentina's 1970s & 80s history, some is taken much further than that. It never feels gratuitous in that it establishes characters and story, but it is A Lot.

So, a simple summary of this huge book would be to say that it's Enriquez processing the horrors of Argentina's dictatorships through fantastical macabre fiction. But that could be just the first chapter. As it goes on, the book encompasses so much more about modern colonialism, the utter ghoulishness of the rich, the hollowness of Swinging London, the AIDS crisis, and so on. The most consistent theme is how completely those with power are willing to treat those without it as un-people, which makes the death / immortality cult at the centre of the story a perfect microcosm. And the ways different characters struggle to make sense of what's going on with limited or no knowledge of that cult feels like a very realistic exploration of how conspiracy theories develop.

I'm definitely a little biased in favour of this book because the author and the main character are just a couple of years older than me, and because an assortment of random factors left me a little less ignorant about Argentina's 20th century history than most of Latin America's. So the real world parts and the cultural references hit home particularly well - even down to a scene when Gaspar puts on "The Cure's new album" to work through his feelings about something and I could identify which album and remember how I'd felt when I first heard it. But I also think it's just a very well told story in general.

Subjects

Romance literature