Song For Night

Advance Praise:

Chris Abani might be the most courageous writer working right now. There is no subject matter he finds daunting, no challenge he fears. Aside from that, he's stunningly prolific and writes like an angel. If you want to get at the molten heart of contemporary fiction, Abani is the starting point.

- Dave Eggers

Song for Night left me, for a time, without words for praise, because of its voiceless eloquence and desolate beauty. But the novella is trance, nightmare, chant, elegy, reve - an unforgettable journey.

- Susan Straight

Not since Jerzy Kosiniki's The Painted Bird or Agota Kristof's Notebook Trilogy has there been such a harrowing novel about what it's like to be a young person in a war. That Chris Abani is able to find humanity, mercy, and even, yes, forgiveness, amid such devastation is something of a miracle.

- Rebecca Brown

The moment you enter these pages, you step into a beautiful and terrifying dream. You are in the hands of a master, a literary shaman. Abani casts his spell so completely - so devastatingly - you emerge cleansed, redeemed and utterly haunted.

- Brad Kessler

From the Critics:

Like the protagonists of such novellas as Flaubert’s “Simple Heart” and J. M. Coetzee’s “Waiting for the Barbarians,” My Luck is an archetypal character…and like Flaubert’s Félicité and Coetzee’s unnamed magistrate, My Luck is both archetypal and utterly himself, thanks to Abani’s attention to detail…Abani attains a calibration as delicate as it is essential. As a result, “Song for Night” contains, at once, an extraordinary ferocity and a vulnerable beauty all its own.
— New York Times

"If peace ever comes, I hope it makes us wiser," thinks the voiceless teenage soldier at the heart of Chris Abani's wrenching new novella, "Song for Night." What makes this book a luminous addition to the burgeoning literature on boy soldiers is the way the author both undercuts and reinforces such hopeful sentiments…with its primary focus on imagery…and its spare, musical language…The lyrical intensity of the writing perfectly suits the material…"Song for Night" is a devastating portrait of a boy holding onto the shreds of his innocence during a war that deliberately, remorselessly works to yank it away.
— Los Angeles Times

The beauty of the work lies in My Luck's haunting narration, an "inner-speech" that fittingly is one of pained detachment…Abani is finely attuned to the sufferings of women, and especially young girls, in a patriarchal, power-obsessed world, and he works with a moral imperative to unravel the bizarre and corrupt practices that supposedly transform boys into men.
— Washington Post

Abani’s glinting sentences are radiant with tenderness as he reminds us, once again, that horror is integral to life, running like a dark vein beneath the verdant earth…Attuned to all that is evil and sublime, open to life’s full spectrum of pain and pleasure, Chris Abani is a writer of mesmerizing powers, embracing warmth, and transcendent compassion.
— Donna Seaman in BookLust

Abani -- who won the 2005 PEN/Hemingway award for his novel Graceland -- provides an impressive and fast-paced barrage of description and observation of war narrated with such dry and lucid precision that it brings to mind Babel, Hemingway, McCarthy.

- Esquire

[Song for Night] thematically resembles Cormac McCarthy's The Road, but here the terror is all the more potent because of its grounding in our real, current events. The genius of Abani's work derives from his intellectual engagement with our world and his unflinching depictions, in the most mesmerizing language imaginable, of its most insidious horrors and its richest beauties. Song for Night demonstrates, yet again, why Abani ranks among our most incendiary and emotionally devastating and important writers.

-Miami Herald

... immersive and dreamlike (and, strangely, lucid) ... Abani finds in his narrator a seed of hope amid the bleak, nihilistic terrain.

- Starred Review. Publisher's Weekly.

Abani never backs away from a gruesome detail, but the gore is never sensationalized. The horror of what happens to this Igbo boy is intensified by his confusion and his tenderness.

- BookList

Chris Abani weaves compassion with horror...Abani's bare prose...underscores Song for Night's message: Some stories are too intense for mere language

- Entertainment Weekly.