The Sunlit Night

By: Rebecca Dinerstein

Narrated by: Julie McKay

Length: 8 hrs and 8 mins

Publisher's summary

From an exhilarating new voice, a stunning debut novel - which Jonathan Safran Foer calls as "lyrical as a poem, psychologically rich as a thriller".

In the beautiful, barren landscape of the Far North, under the ever-present midnight sun, Frances and Yasha are surprised to find refuge in each other. Their lives have been upended - Frances has fled heartbreak and claustrophobic Manhattan for an isolated artist colony; Yasha arrives from Brooklyn to fulfill his beloved father's last wish: to be buried "at the top of the world. They have come to learn how to be alone. But in Lofoten, an archipelago of six tiny islands in the Norwegian Sea, 95 miles north of the Arctic Circle, they form a bond that fortifies them against the turmoil of their distant homes, offering solace amidst great uncertainty.

With nimble and sure-footed prose, Dinerstein reveals that no matter how far we travel to claim our own territory, it is ultimately love that gives us our place in the world.

©2015 Rebecca Dinerstein (P)2015 Audible Inc.

Critic reviews

"Narrator Julie McKay strikes just the right tone--languid with an edge of sarcasm--to suit this offbeat coming-of-age romance between two New Yorkers in a Norwegian landscape filled with perpetual light." ( AudioFile)

A Must-Listen!

Any additional comments?

It's been a long time since I encountered a book this good. The writing, the characters, and especially the setting make it seem as if you're listening to a particularly good fable or fairy tale that you've never encountered before. The switching between characters' voices can be confusing (I wish the narrator had paused just a little bit before each jump), but once you get used to that, you can get lost in this book. I was crying by the end. Give it a listen--you won't regret it.

A Poet's Novel

Rebecca Dinerstein's The Sunlit Night is a treasure of spare prose, beautiful imagery and young adult sensibilities stripped down to a lovely essence.

anticlimactic

hard to get into. and many of the details given about characters are completely irrelevant to the plot

Don't waste your money

I didn't pay for this, but I desperately wished I hadn't wasted a credit. I barely got through 30 minutes, the writing style was so annoying and weird. The storyline is boring.

Amateur character development and boring story

I listened to the whole 8 hours of this novel just hoping it would get better but was left unsatisfied. The author springs so many assumptions on the reader and I found most of the characters unlikeable. The only two I really liked were Frances and the artist she assists. Yasha was unbearable and whiny and I couldn't ever wrap my head around why Frances liked him. None of the romances in this book were believable-- there was never any buildup to the romances just an apparent "love at first sight" argument which is not novel or interesting.
I will say that a lot of the descriptors of the scenery were convincing and often poetic in a way I appreciated. I liked the idea of following a young artist on an apprenticeship but the story drifts away from that quickly to relationship drama and no part of that story line ever seemed to have a point. Sorry, but this debut novel is uninteresting.