The Night Always Comes

Nov 15

The Night Always Comes by Willy Vlautin
Reviewed by Jess
📕📕📕📕📕

I cannot tell you how excited I was when this book dropped through my letterbox. It’s been a long wait since the emotional ruin of Don’t Skip Out On Me, and I was just about recovered and ready to go again. Willy Vlautin did not disappoint, and has delivered another masterful character study of an underdog trying to make it. Please make this book your next one to read!

It would be an understatement to say that Lynette has had a really difficult life. But now, right as she’s trying to swim up to the surface, she’s pushed back down underwater. We follow Lynette over just a few days, in her car that barely starts, driving through the skeletons of her old life to recover what she needs to start again. On the surface it’s about getting money to buy a house, but really it’s so much more; it’s independence, stability, safety, everything she’s been missing her whole life.

There’s some pretty rough reading to get through here, and my heart hurt for Lynette and everything she’d been though. Her family dynamic in particular was devastating to read. Mother daughter relationships are never easy but the one in this story was truly heartbreaking. This examination and reckoning of the American Dream is raw and wonderful, and I know this book will stay with me for a long time. Lynette forever!!! 💖💖💖

Don't Skip Out On MeWilly VlautinJessfamily dramathe night always comesamerican dreamfaber books

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.