Wolf Moon

‘’A smoky blackness swallows up the mustard path. There is a bite in the room and the bullish wind seems like a living, breathing, angry entity.’’

God, in His unfathomable wisdom, created the Day and the Night. One cannot exist without the other. And though most of us grow apprehensive, even nervous, once the sun sets — even I, who adore the tranquillity of darkness — try living in a country where daylight is constant through summer. It’s excruciating.

Night hides a different universe in its folds. And this beautiful book serves as our guide into that realm: a poignant, mystical journey through the shadows and their lurkers, human or otherwise.

Starting on the Normandy coast, Arifa Akbar narrates a tale about the isolated island during the dark hours, the rural night, ushering us into the deep feeling of insecurity that permeates every woman's evening walk. Echoing Charles Dickens's insomniac wanderings, she takes us into a 24-hour play in the West End and reminisces on her father's slow surrendering to dementia. She talks about the unsettling phenomenon of ‘’sun-downing’’ and the hospitals at night.

‘’I can’t remember when I first stopped sleeping soundly.’’

Somnambulism and Van Gogh’s torment. Murakami’s dreamlike narratives and Moshfegh’s hallucinatory novels become vessels for Akbar’s most intimate thread: the story of her sister’s mental health struggles and eventual death.

She writes of night terrors — or was the room truly haunted? — of strange female figures glimpsed on Waterloo Bridge or crouched outside a bedroom door. And all the while, ghostly presences drift through the pages: Virginia Woolf, Anaïs Nin, Dorothy Wordsworth, and the tortured brilliance of Sarah Kane. Even Goya’s Black Paintings loom in the dark, a visual chorus of anguish and shadow.

Sex workers in Amsterdam, BDSM clubs in Berlin, dancers in Lahore. Night tours in Whitechapel, immigrant workers in London’s nightly markets. Like a contemporary Edward Hopper, Arifa Akbar draws the portrait of Night and, especially, the portraits of the creatures - whatever their origin - that inhabit it. A book unlike anything I have ever read.

‘’I rushed downstairs, to the kitchen, whose window overlooks the building's many little allotments. It is a black mirror, reflecting my face back at me. There are shadows here too. Has the ghost woman pattered down the stairs with me? I eat quickly before racing back upstairs. When I pass the corner, I feel its filled vacancy. I know it is my imagination that gives the darkness its freighted quality. And yet I remain scared. The woman is someone I carry with me now, and I place her here every time I pass. It is a story I keep telling myself. A decision to fill the darkness with something over nothing.’’

Many thanks to Sceptre and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review

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