Our Share of Night
£6.60
Gaspar is in danger. Only six-years-old, he is frightened he may have inherited the same strange abilities as his father, Juan; a powerful medium who can open locked doors, commune with the dead, and possess the ancient forces of the Darkness.
Now father and son are in flight, hunted by the Order, a group of wealthy acolytes who seek to harness the Darkness, no matter the cost. Among them, Gaspar’s grandmother, whose twisted desires have already driven her to commit unspeakable acts.
Nothing will stop the Order, nothing is beyond them. Surrounded by horrors, can Gaspar and Juan break free?
Spanning the brutal years of Argentina’s military dictatorship and its turbulent aftermath, Our Share of Night is a haunting, thrilling novel of broken families, cursed land, inheritance, power, and the terrible sacrifices a father will make to help his son escape his destiny.
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Additional information
| Publisher | Granta Books (13 Oct. 2022) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| File size | 2666 KB |
| Text-to-Speech | Enabled |
| Screen Reader | Supported |
| Enhanced typesetting | Enabled |
| X-Ray | Not Enabled |
| Word Wise | Enabled |
| Sticky notes | On Kindle Scribe |
| Print length | 609 pages |
| Page numbers source ISBN | 0451495144 |
by Caitlin
Couldn’t put it down and feel lost now it’s finished and have to leave it’s world.
by Andrew
The character building at the beginning is great and you feel a strong connection with the protagonist. As the story continues however it loses the thread and becomes somewhat meandering, not fulfilling the potential, which is a real shame. Still some good bits in there but not what I had hoped for the ending.
by Maria Ionela Fordon
The book takes too long to get into the action so I’m really finding it hard to finish it.
by Rosie
Very good book
by Mr Ryman
Pretty scary and nicely written. Its long and ambling but creates an atmos.
by Tales of a Librarian
Our Share of Night is a head trip – mostly in a good way. It’s as if Stephen King and Anne Rice had a secret love child who was raised by the mirror universe version of Isabelle Allende. It’s compulsively readable and yet not really an easy read. And it’s going to completely piss some people off due to the way it’s structured. There are no chapters, the book is divided into very uneven sections. And just as you start to feel you’ve got your feet under you in the narrative, it shifts and you’re dropped into a new perspective with a new mood and even a new theme. Enríquez slows down for no one. She demands you keep up if you want to understand, and you’re only going to get answers by reading the entire book so that you understand the end.
I would definitely file this under horror although it rejects the more western modes of horror storytelling, instead following a dark magical realism course. So don’t expect splashy horror pyrotechnics or a huge climactic battle against evil. In fact you’d be hard pressed to discover who is actually the villain in this book – with the possible exception of Luis, everyone is varying shades of awful. In addition, where the more supernatural and grotesque horror occurs, it’s very horrible, very horrifying. There’s a lot of body horror and human cruelty, all of which is far worse than the incomprehensible supernatural entity worshipped as a god.
All that aside, I found this satisfying in a way few horror novels are. It was beautifully written, deep, dense thematically. The characters were complicated. The story was addictive and repulsive. And it ended on an oddly hopeful note. Flawed, incomplete and broken though it was here, the human ability to love outstripped the raw avarice of those who rejected it as illogical and thus met their downfall. This is a subtle, clever and disturbing book. I can see why it won’t be for everyone. I loved it.
by Rosie
Book arrived with smudges and ink/similar on the front cover. Didn’t think it would be worth returning the book, but it was disappointing when I was so excited for this hardcover.
“Our Share of Night” is a great novel however, and I would highly recommend it.
by R
Well one thing is making me happy about this book. I’ve finally finished it.
A gothic horror set in South America based on the relationship between a “chosen” father and son, this book is bloated in the extreme.
Containing sections rather than chapters, they happen in slightly different timelines and they just go on forever.
The first 100 or so pages of this book is bonkers. It feels like the middle or the ending of the book. Crazy occult “god worshipping” sacrifices to “the darkness”, extreme violence, mad ideas, I was reading and wondering how this book was going to stretch to 700+ pages.
Well it did. Completely changed pace and seemed to be somewhat of a melodrama, political commentary and social commentary section.
The final section felt like treading over old ground, any shock value or surprise gone as it stuttered(literally)towards its disappointing conclusion.
There is some interesting, if not straight forward ideas here for the horror genre. A lot of the “family” sections reminded me a lot of the French film Martyrs with its ideas. The problem was all the shock value was gone on the first 100 pages. The rest relied on the authors craft and storytelling and creation of characters and the world they inhabited. All I felt ultimately failed. Characters felt extremely weak, unlikeable to a tea and hard to empathize or connect with any of them.
The rambling descriptive passages were incessant even in the the most tense sections, totally ruining the momentum of the book.
At its core it’s just way too long for what it is. I’ve read bigger books in the past but this one felt never ending. Structurally a bit of a mess, thematically interesting but poorly executed with uninteresting characters in what was ultimately and uninteresting, bloated and overly long story.
Thanks to the publisher for the ARC though Netgalley.