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Book Reviewed by:Hildur Knútsdóttir's The Night Guest is an eerie and ensnaring story set in contemporary Reykjavík that's sure to keep you awake at night.
Iðunn is in yet another doctor's office. She knows her constant fatigue is a sign that something's not right, but practitioners dismiss her symptoms and blood tests haven't revealed any cause.
When she talks to friends and family about it, the refrain is the same ― have you tried eating better? exercising more? establishing a nighttime routine? She tries to follow their advice, buying everything from vitamins to sleeping pills to a step-counting watch. Nothing helps.
Until one night Iðunn falls asleep with the watch on, and wakes up to find she's walked over 40,000 steps in the night ...
What is happening when she's asleep? Why is she waking up with increasingly disturbing injuries? And why won't anyone believe her?
Excerpt
The Night Guest
Iðunn is in yet another doctor's office. She knows her constant fatigue is a sign that something's not right, but practitioners dismiss her symptoms and blood tests haven't revealed any cause.
When she talks to friends and family about it, the refrain is the same—have you tried eating better? exercising more? establishing a nighttime routine? She tries to follow their advice, buying everything from vitamins to sleeping pills to a step-counting watch. Nothing helps.
Until one night Iðunn falls asleep with the watch on, and wakes up to find she's walked over 40,000 steps in the night…
What is happening when she's asleep? Why is she waking up with increasingly disturbing injuries? And why won't anyone believe her?
1
"Can you describe your symptoms?"
I clear my throat. "I'm just so… tired all the time."
"Not sleeping well?"
"No, no. I fall asleep and even sleep through the night. But when I wake up, I feel exhausted. My legs, my arms…"
As if ...
What do you do when your world seems like it's falling apart all around you, and when even before the incident that set things off, you were barely holding it together? In Hildur Knútsdóttir's The Night Guest, translated from the Icelandic by Mary Robinette Kowal, Iðunn grapples with this question. In search of the answer, she descends into a darkness that will leave readers shocked and terrified. Knútsdóttir's novel is a horrifying look into how being a woman complicates prolonged exposure to trauma, whether it be physical, emotional, or a harrowing experience of both...continued
Full Review
(860 words)
(Reviewed by Lisa Ahima).
Clay McLeod Chapman, author of Ghost Eaters
I inhaled this book. Not since Sarah Gran's Come Closer has every sentence sliced at the reader's heart. This book will bleed you out before you're done. Olivie Blake, New York Times bestselling author of The Atlas Six
The Night Guest is evocative and powerfully restrained. At times chilling, at others harrowingly familiar, The Night Guest is a fascinating examination of femininity, agency, and self, and a genuinely heart-pounding read. Rachel Hawkins, New York Times bestselling author of The Wife Upstairs
From its opening pages, Hildur Knútsdóttir's eerie and elegant The Night Guest wraps its icy fingers around you and pulls you in. It's so atmospheric, so well-crafted, and so truly, deeply unsettling that by the end, you feel every bit as haunted as its sleepless heroine. If you're a horror fan―or just a fan of great writing in general―you need to have this one on your radar!It's 2024. COVID-19, while still dangerous, is no longer the unknown factor it once was, and extended quarantines are no longer mandated as in the earlier days, pre-vaccination. Though the world has never stopped talking about what isolation has done to our collective psyche, I think it's only this year that we're starting to see some of the most uniquely relevant narratives about how it feels to be utterly lonely. Not all these narratives are set since the pandemic; for some, the experience has dredged up past feelings, others have had to sit with their overall relationship to being alone. Global isolation has forced us to confront these emotions; at the same time, many have turned to escapism to cope. Two thriller narratives that came out...
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