The Night Always Comes

Written By Linda Malek

The Night Always Comes by Willy Vlautin
Reviewed by Linda
📕📗📘📙📙

Many thanks to @faberbooks for this copy!
It's time to put Willy Vlautin's books on your shelves. This author has the ability to hook you in after a few words and before you know it, the night will have come and you'll be sitting in the dark binge-reading this book - I did. Beware though, Willy isn’t known for his happy endings and this book is at times bleak, emotional, and relentless, but it's worth it.

In spite of this, hope is always at the centre of Willy's novels and in this one, we follow our heroine Lynette, who's been dealt a bad hand in life whilst only just turning 30. Sad, tough, suffering from severe depression, caring for her disabled brother and dejected mother, scraping by with 3 jobs on the go, whilst living in a decrepit house in the rapidly gentrifying area around them, Lynette is on a mission to buy her first home and provide security for her mother and brother. Their landlord is selling their home to them for a decent price, and she knows that this is the only house they will ever be able to afford. It's this drive to call a house a home for her family that gives her the daily fuel she needs to get up in the morning.
Her mother has different ideas however and ruins any chance of Lynette getting a mortgage by deciding to enjoy the little of life she has left, by buying a car on loan instead.
On her quest to get her deposit, Lynette does what she needs to do to survive and goes to every length to retrieve every penny that she lost to the demons she left behind in her 20s, thus revealing her journey in life up to this point.

There is hope and truth in all of Willy's work and as an author, calls it as it is giving us gritty and honest characters. But ultimately, Willy recounts the failure of the American Dream of the society chewed up and spat out by capitalism. Not specific to the US, this is a must-read and so far, one of my favourite reads of the year.

Linda Malek

I've always had the urge to set up a forum and voice my thoughts after each read, but never had the confidence to do so alone. 18 months ago, I got my fellow book-loving friends involved and formed The Candid Book Club! Aside from having an exponentially growing to-read pile and deteriorating shortsightedness, we've been lucky to have been invited to publisher events and have attended several talks with our favourite authors (Thank you and long may they continue!) To take a break from the pressures of PhD Chemistry, Jess and I exchanged books all the time and in my youth, I was that kid with the first editions of Harry Potter having already read Gulliver’s travels and some Charles Dickens. At work, my desk is a library and luckily for me I sit next to another bookworm Jack who entertains all the photo-taking. I'm suffering from a chronic case of wanderlust (age-related crisis) so books which are set as far away from home as possible tend to float my boat: Middle East, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Asia...you name it. But if it's got anything to do with Egypt then I'm all over it. So you get the drift...I read all the time, everywhere (on the tube mostly), everyday, a book a week, and very quickly I'm onto the next! And then sometimes there is a book that stops me in my tracks, makes me want to swallow the pages whole, and have it next to me at all times, with some sentences staying with me forever: Shantaram by David Gregory Roberts, anything by Khaled Hosseini, The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo (absolute gem of a woman), A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, The Good Immigrant edited by Nikesh Shuklaand and anything by Naguib Mahfouz.

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