The Night Always Comes

Written By Linda Malek

The Night Always Comes by Willy Vlautin
Reviewed by Mimi
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I don't think any author breaks my heart as much as Willy Vlautin. Don't Skip Out On Me really tugged at my heartstrings and this novel I think broke them. From the first page, Lynette has you sucked in as a protagonist. She is a young woman working several jobs so she can buy the house she currently lives in with her disabled older brother and mother.

This novel is a blend of Lynette going on a journey to get the money she needs and understanding some of her past and why she has ended up in this situation. She makes some God awful decisions along the way and trusts some really rotten people. I have to say though, the way Willy Vlautin writes about her mental illness was so candid and powerful. I was rooting for her all the way through and at so many points, I was really worried that one of the incidents might prove too much for her. The mother-daughter relationship is strained to say the least. I found her mother to be selfish and cruel and that's why so much of the story, I wanted her to succeed.

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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