This book is great! Would definitely recommend. Thanks so much to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

What Happens at Night is a rather surreal, dreamlike story about a nameless couple from New York City travelling to “a place at the edge of the world, in the north of a northern country”, to adopt a child. The town they arrive to is as mysterious as the snow, cold and darkness that always prevail. From this description one might think that this is a dreary story of a couple that leave New York to reinvent their marriage through adoption, but it is far more than that. The language is rich, with touches of humor. The characters are as interesting as the beautiful language found on every page. There is Livia Pinheiro-Rima, an ageless, mysteries women who could be eighty or one hundred and eighty, who plays the piano in the lounge of the Borgarfjaroasysla Grand Imperial Hotel. Lárus, the hotel bar tender that “lifts himself away from the wall” to serve the local schnapps “made from lichen” which is “not clear, but tinged with the silvery blue glow that snow reflects at twilight”. And then there is Brother Emmanuel an angekok who lives in a place where “no one comes here by accident” and when the wife meets him, feels she can be cured.

Stylistically I found that the technique of giving the husband and wife no names, while the peripheral characters had rich, complex names, very interesting, but it did create an isolating feeling towards these two protagonists. Personally I found this an interesting way for the reader to become more emerged in this dreamlike world and intellectually part of the story. I enjoyed this surreal novel and I think anyone who is looking for something different will find this a nice change from novels currently being released.

Thank you NetGalley for giving me the opportunity to read What Happens at Night by Peter Cameron

Went into this completely blind, minus admiring the beautiful cover image. It's a slow freeze of a story, sort of shocking you with its severity, but eventually you're undressing to dance in the snow. The setting is surreal in that it seems to take place in a thoroughly modern world but a weird 1930s microcosm of society. The relationships were just as confusing. But the novel is reminiscent of David Lynch's work in that the window dressings and mood setting are just as important as its story. A creative, mercurial novel.

This strange, atmospheric novel was an absolute delight. And, yes, best enjoyed reading at night. The story was vaguely similar to an episode of The Romanoffs and equally disturbing.

I’m not terribly familiar with Peter Cameron - only having read a few of his stories in anthologies and collections. There was something about “What Happens at Night” that seemed intriguing. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I could immediately feel how much “What Happens at Night” channels Kafka. I was so proud of my insight and was sure that I would be first to the trough with it. Alas - I noticed as I was hunting for the title page that Edmund White had beat me to it. Oh, well…But it is perfect Kafka – mysterious, mostly unnamed people, in a mysterious, essentially unnamed place, on a mission that seems unlikely and sketchy at best. The atmosphere is stunningly vivid and bleak. The characters evolve in dire and unexpected ways. The story line is grim, but with a glimmer of hope. Nothing makes sense, but maybe everything makes sense. It is all cinematic in a Scandinavian noir way. Mini-series, anyone?

I’m going to catch up on everything Cameron very soon. Just my kind of author.

Thanks to Catapult and NetGalley for the eARC. Much appreciated.

It’s a rather eerie story in a setting eerie in its own. A New York couple end up in the Grand Imperial Hotel in a far northern city of north Europe. The coldness of the climate seeps into the reader as the nameless couple interact with the inhabitants as they try to adopt a baby boy from an orphanage. I’d call this more of a character study than an actual novel. And some like Livia, who is a liar and a lounge singer, who mothers the couple is the most memorable.

For some unknown reason I did enjoy this book. Possibly the atmosphere and setting. Could have done without the sexual assault and rape references. The ending was a bit of a muddled letdown.

Overall a distracting and moody read.

I knew from the first paragraph that I was going to love this novel, and then it kept getting better. The control of scene and mood here is exhilarating. The experience of reading this language is almost filmic--I experienced continual rapid-fire flashes of scene, and even impressions of lighting and cinematography in some scenes, as I read. The writing itself is literary, in spite of it having this vivid, filmic quality. I can feel the care that went into every choice. It's such a pleasure to read. The effect of Camerons language gripped me from the first paragraph, which begins with a disorienting scene set in a train. The mood is anxious, approaching paranoia. It's incredibly effective. It's a language that perfectly supports the underlying story, which is delightfully unnerving. The meticulous attention to word and rhythm reminds me of some of Nabokov's more disorienting novels, like Bend Sinister perhaps. I'll be reading all of Cameron's novels now.

Thank you to NetGalley and Catapult for this extremely enjoyable novel.

If I ever got on Jeopardy, a Fairy Tales category could be my undoing. I never read (or was read) fairy tales growing up, so have very little affinity for or knowledge of them. I do find intriguing that there are the original “adult” versions that include lots of violence, and the “kiddie” versions that seem to be more prevalent in the culture.

Peter Cameron’s What Happens at Night seems to me a fairy tale of the adult variety. Two characters, who are called only “the man” and “the woman” take a long journey to a Finland-esque northern country to adopt a baby. That they are of a nebulous advanced age, and the woman is dying of advanced uterine cancer, and therefore unlikely adoption candidates is part of the fairy tale setting. The rest is the snow-enveloped community around the Borgarfjaroasysla Grand Imperial Hotel, and if you don’t think of Wes Anderson and Ralph Fiennes, you’re better than me.

There is a quirky, and occasionally vaguely menacing cast of characters around the hotel, who all add to the atmosphere, including Livia Pinheiro-Rima, who goes around wearing a giant bear coat, or sequined gowns, as appropriate, or inappropriate, depending on how you look at it.

I found all of this intriguing, and not frustrating in the least. I shouldn’t be surprised since Andorra, Cameron’s novel from 20 years ago, is somewhat similar in it’s weird-foreign-displacement feel, and also my favorite of his.

One only wonders whether Simon, the adopted son in What Happens at Night, will have a Disney-esque upbringing.

Quite honestly, I couldn't see this novel. to the end. Formatting for me played a huge issue, so I had to DNF it.. I'm truly sorry, cause I wanted to like this, but between the formatting and how the dialogue was formatted made my whole reading experience bad one.

I first heard Peter Cameron's name when I overheard a conversation between two authors who I respect, when one of them said she read everything Cameron wrote and was surprised when she had heard him referred to as a "niche writer." Intrigued, upon reading him, I discovered he could not fall into any category, and one of the myriad of blurbs on What Happens At Night suggested the term Cameronesque should be coined. The advance blurbs on this book are spectacular from a wide range of respected writers, many of whom don't fall into any category themselves. Accolades from so many authors could grant him the title a "writer's writer" -- his style is unique.

As I read, I was reminded me of early Ian McEwan, Paul Bowles -- of innocents abroad and completely out of their depth, overhanging menace, dread. Here a terminally ill woman and her husband travel to an icebound Eastern European country to take possession of a baby in order to repair their crumbling marriage. That's all I'll say of the plot. The two principal characters are unnamed, but secondaries are given names and at least in one case, is always referred to by her entire first and last hyphenate every time she is referenced. Lack of punctuation seems to be common these days, but once into the swing of the proceedings, barely noticeable. Highly recommended.

A couple known to the reader only as "the man" and "the woman" travels to a nameless town in a nameless country north of the Arctic Circle in order to pick up the baby they adopted. If that doesn't prepare you for a sojourn in an overly abstracted, symbolically determined universe, the fact that the anonynauts are mentored by an ancient cabaret singer who speaks in riddles and a faith healer named Brother Emmanuel Oh, did I mention that the woman is dying of cancer and Brother Emmanuel owns a parrot? And best of all, every major change in the characters' relationship is heralded by . . . a bowl of soup.

The semiotics of this bizarre fictional realm will strike the reader as either horribly or hilariously pretentious. I vote for the latter, since Mr. Cameron seems to have a pretty playful sense of humor. The pages are bursting with absurd declarations ("I won't sleep with an ugly prostitute just to please you!"), deadpan observations ("the sauce was congealing, and the chunks of meat were looking oddly slick and somewhat purple"), and absurd analogies ("holding his penis like this made him feel . . . self-contained, like an electrical extension cord that is coiled up and then plugged back into itself"). But I don't think "What Happens at Night" is intended to be satirical, or even comic. Beneath the absurdity is some genuine love and lose. I like the juxtaposition of surreal tone and real emotion.

But there are a couple of incongruities which Mr. Cameron might want to consider before "What Happens at Night" is published: when the man and the woman first arrive at the hotel, they seem to snuggle together in bed, but later we learn that the woman can't stand to be touched since her cancer diagnosis. Later, a flock of crows flies away "complainingly" as the couple's taxi approaches Brother Emmanuel's hermitage, but towards the end the man muses on how he hasn't seen any birds in this town. (To say nothing of the parrot.) These inconsistencies may be intentional, of course.

This is dark and surprising, and ultimately I found it very disheartening. It is desperately sad - though I did want to see it to the end.

man and woman, husband and wife, take a journey to "a place at the edge of the world, in the far north of a northern country" to adopt a child. Tension and dislocation build between the man and woman, neither of whom are named, and they pull further away from each other, adrift in the cold, creepiness of the Borgarfjaroasysla Grand Imperial Hotel. At first this book oozes with a type of disorientation that's almost cozy, when one is so far out of their element that every single creature comfort becomes monumental - turning on the furnace to warm the room, taking a hot bath, having a drink at the bar in your deserted hotel (the local schnapps tastes "faintly of bleach and watercress and spearmint and rice" which sounds strange and delightful). The writing is lovely: the dark forest with trees crowded against train windows, the faint red light and curtain of glass beads at the doorway of the bar, the falling snow and foggy cafe windows and Livia Pinhiero-Rima's Russian black bear coat. But the man and woman remained bloodless and never developed as characters for me. I found them both unsympathetic and the decisions they made to be nonsensical; considering their circumstances, the fact that I wasn't really able to emphasize with either one of them was disheartening. And the eccentric cast of characters they meet seemed to be drawn as quirky for no reason, acting out near the main characters without any depth. I didn't want to leave this unread, but it was a struggle to finish because I didn't care what happened to anyone but the baby they were there to adopt.