The Great Night | Granta

  • Published: 07/06/2012
  • ISBN: 9781847083210
  • 129x20mm
  • 304 pages

The Great Night

Chris Adrian

On Midsummer’s Eve three heartsick lovers are trapped in San Francisco’s Buena Vista Park. Ill met by moonlight, they are stalked by a psychopathic Puck, in thrall to a beautiful Titania, and ambushed by a homeless musical theatre troupe. Together they must survive a night that might just repair their hearts, if it doesn’t destroy them first.

Selected by the New Yorker as one of the best young writers in America, Adrian has created a singularly playful, moving and humorous novel – a story that effortlessly crosses the borders between reality and dreams, suffering and magic, and mortality and immortality.

Chris Adrian is the most extraordinary novelist you've never heard of. The book is surprisingly, very funny. And moving. And quite unlike anything I've read so far this century...If you're willing to enter something magical, something dazzling and heartbreaking, then Adrian is a writer for you.

Patrick Ness, Guardian

Bewitching... This magical and fearless work is a near-blueprint of what a novel ought to be

Olivia Laing, Observer

A work of sustained imagination. Interweaving stories and situations that are in turn kitsch, camp, wry and heartbreaking ... a profoundly humane and moving work

Adam O’Riordan, Sunday Telegraph

The Author

Selected by the New Yorker as one of the ’20 Under 40′, Chris Adrian is the author of Gob’s Grief, The Children’s Hospital, A Better Angel and The Great Night. He is a Pediatric Hematologist/Oncologist at Columbia University.

More about the author →

From the Same Author

Chris Adrian on Granta.com

Fiction | Granta 120

Grand Rounds

Chris Adrian

‘I used to fall asleep in those same seats during lectures just like this one.’