Great Night - by Chris Adrian (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Acclaimed as a "gifted, courageous writer"(The New York Times), Chris Adrian brings all his extraordinary talents to bear in The Great Night--a brilliant and mesmerizing retelling of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream."

On Midsummer Eve 2008, three people, each on the run from a failed relationship, become trapped in San Francisco's Buena Vista Park, the secret home of Titania, Oberon, and their court. On this night, something awful is happening in the faerie kingdom: in a fit of sadness over the end of her marriage, which broke up in the wake of the death of her adopted son, Titania has set loose an ancient menace, and the chaos that ensues will threaten the lives of immortals and mortals alike.

Selected by The New Yorker as one the best young writers in America, Adrian has created a singularly playful, heartbreaking, and humorous novel--a story that charts the borders between reality and dreams, love and magic, and mortality and immortality.

Review Quotes

"Adrian takes great imaginative risks in his writing....He clearly knows the sorrow of the human comedy and what fools we mortals be. Brush aside your Shakespeare, and you will find the same in The Great Night." --The Washington Post

"A touching human story of 'mortal sadness'...interweaving stories and situations that are in turn kitsch, camp, wry, and heartbreaking. Adrian balances seemingly incongruous elements to form a profoundly humane and moving work." --The Telegraph (London)

"As moving as it is imaginative...Amid the magical romp, Adrian...manages to grapple with the problems and joys of the most human of emotions: love." --GQ

"Whimsical, very sad, wonderful...At age forty, Adrian ranks among the best novelists of his generation, a moralist of a very high order....He has taken the scaffolding of Shakespeare's play to build a cautionary tale about the dangers lurking in all of us." --The Cleveland Plain Dealer

About the Author

Chris Adrian is the author of Gob's Grief, The Children's Hospital, and A Better Angel. Selected by The New Yorker as one of their "20 Under 40," he lives in San Francisco, where he is a fellow in pediatric hematology-oncology.