The End of Nightwork

Product Information

pissed-off points for the romance, which took the lazy way out by being a 'love at first sight' - because that somehow explains how easy all of it seemed. Even for the parts when it wasn't easy - for example, when Miranda struggles to reorient her own principles to accomodate how strongly she feels for Harry - there's barely any justification. Easy answer: she's in love, so she accepts everything. Roberts develops her characters beautifully and the story really is in the intricate details. While it seems to start slowly, the build-up and the ending make it worth the wait! Awesome twist. For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. 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

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: I enjoyed this story, quite a bit, as it meandered through Harry’s life from childhood through his adult maturation. His travels took me from coast to coast in the US, to Europe and other continents. I was never bored because he was interesting and, if I’m honest, I’m a die-hard fan of Roberts’ storytelling style. While this is categorized as romantic suspense, it reads more like contemporary fiction with romantic and suspense elements. It’s my only criticism, though I’m happy regardless of the label. 4.5 stars NIGHTWORK by Nora Roberts is a unique romantic suspense with a young hero who grows up to becomes a gentleman thief with his own set of rules and moral code. This is a standalone that that is mainly told from the viewpoint of the hero. 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. But while Pol is failing to complete his research on Playfere, he encounters a radical new movement that argues that all economic and political events are part of an aeon-long struggle between the old and the young - that the 'hoarist' habit of violence, their need to conquer, has also affected how they treat the planet. The leader of this popular movement predicts an imminent inter-generational conflict - father against son, mother against daughter - that echoes Playfere's own prophecies.

Advance Praise

An all important point before all else: I make it a point to not judge characters for things they do for love, but had I been rating this taking into account how I felt about Harry's nightwork - this would be a -5 stars, no doubt. This nightwork begins with having to pay for his mother's cancer treatment - and I can see that. I can see why that made him desperate, how right and wrong did not matter - if that nightwork money meant his mother got her treatment and could continue living in their house. But everything that Harry did after his mother died was a conscious choice, and I will never understand that and neither do I want to. I feel like the point of this book was to show how a man could be a thief (an actual, stealing for personal profit thief) but still have 'morals'. There was a whole lot of justification for his work, how his 'why' (of which there was none, in my opinion, after his mother was gone) made him a 'good' person, and how he was 'different' from the rest, how his work had 'rules' and 'principles' which somehow made him better than people who killed like brutes, but I completely fail to understand or empathize with him. Most importantly, I refuse to. 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 is a satisfyingly odd novel. It is both an urgent grappling with the frightening times we live in and a meditation on what Chaucer called “the woe that is in marriage”. He fell in love with the ocean, the hills, New Orleans, North Carolina, and a beautiful girl named Miranda. He read, and educated himself and did everything he could to follow the rules he set when he was only 12 and doing the only thing he knew could work. When that all caught up to him, and he had to leave it all behind, he didn't think he'd fall in love with anything again. But isn't that just human nature? So he fell in love with a house. With his students. And with the same girl. And he would not be ran off from it again. From mystics and soothsayers to madmen and mountebanks, prophets people many of my very favourite books and stories. Here are some of them.

I want to start by saying that I tried to keep my walls up about our main character. He has so many names, but Booth is the most important. I tried so hard not to love him and failed completely. He was just a kid when he stole to keep his mother's bills paid while she fought the demon that is cancer. He was barely out of high school when he lost her. He traveled and changed who he was and existed in a world that never gave him a chance. Perhaps as a way of coming to terms with this, he looks for meaning in the past. An earnest autodidact, the adult Pol begins to research a book about Bartholomew Playfere, a fictional 17th-century tub-preacher who predicted ecological cataclysm. According to Playfere’s pamphlet The End of Nightwork and the Sundering of the Curtain in Twayn, the end of the world will begin not in the Holy Land but on an island off the coast of Connemara. Pol is so inspired he chooses the island as his honeymoon destination. He also feels a strange kinship when he discovers there are gaps in the prophet’s history: “His life story seemed to leap from his childhood to … his ill-advised pilgrimage to the island where he and his followers lived out the rest of their lives awaiting the coming apocalypse.” Nightwork is a book I would recommend to anyone who loves romance. It has everything that makes for a great novel. Loved it!!!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. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. 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." a focus on caring, particularly for someone who ages faster than their partner, and the inter-generation burdens of care; 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.’

At the end of his prophetic journey through hell, purgatory and heaven, Dante has a vision of a book. Standing in the presence of God, he sees “bound up with love together in one volume, what through the universe in leaves is scattered”. Here is a basic taxonomy then: God is a novelist. Human beings are His characters. Prophets are the readers. Funder reveals how O’Shaughnessy Blair self-effacingly supported Orwell intellectually, emotionally, medically and financially ... why didn’t Orwell do the same for his wife in her equally serious time of need?’I just adore Harry! He makes me think of Frank Abagnale from Catch Me If You Can. Although he doesn't hurt or kill people, his moral codes make me think of Orphan X. The boy now a man has skills, he stays under the radar, a bit of a loner but eventually falls for a girl. He's brilliant at math, tech, languages (5?), and literature. He cooks gourmet foods and even bakes his own bread! While the fashionable method of short, separated paragraph units sometimes impedes the prose, Pol’s understated wit is fine company Cottrell-Boyce is an ambitious writer and, for all its concern with bleak futures, his debut left me intrigued to see what he writes next. The End of Nightwork is a novel rich in provocative and timely ideas, yet seductively readable. While the fashionable narrative method of short, separated paragraph units sometimes impedes the prose, Pol’s understated wit is fine company. And despite the novel’s complex philosophical and theological underpinning, its characters are always vividly alive. There’s a rare originality here, and a willingness to take risks, that promises great things.