Walking into the Night: A Novel - Hardcover
From the acclaimed author of The Journey Home, a new novel of tremendous power and beauty about a man’s hidden past and about the immutability of love and loss.
For twenty years Christian Benediktsson has led a quiet life as William Randolph Hearst’s butler. His days are filled with the rituals of Hearst’s life and the demands of running a grand house. But in his most private thoughts and memories, he relives another life: his abandonment of his wife and children in Iceland for an actress in New York, a reckless affair and a tragic death, financial downfall, and the profound retreat from life that led him to Hearst’s San Simeon. No one else knows the secret of the man he once was—husband, father, businessman, lover—and, ultimately, even he will choose to forget that this person ever existed.
Walking into the Night is a stunning portrait of a man wrestling with guilt and secret passions. Olaf Olafsson surpasses anything he has accomplished thus far in this wise and beautiful novel.
For twenty years Christian Benediktsson has led a quiet life as William Randolph Hearst’s butler. His days are filled with the rituals of Hearst’s life and the demands of running a grand house. But in his most private thoughts and memories, he relives another life: his abandonment of his wife and children in Iceland for an actress in New York, a reckless affair and a tragic death, financial downfall, and the profound retreat from life that led him to Hearst’s San Simeon. No one else knows the secret of the man he once was—husband, father, businessman, lover—and, ultimately, even he will choose to forget that this person ever existed.
Walking into the Night is a stunning portrait of a man wrestling with guilt and secret passions. Olaf Olafsson surpasses anything he has accomplished thus far in this wise and beautiful novel.
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From the Back Cover:
Praise for The Journey Home by Olaf Olafsson
“Compelling . . . Akin to Thomas Mann . . . An astonishing story of confusion, loss, denial. Olafsson has created a woman of such complexity and uncalculated charm that he will leave readers wishing that they could actually meet her before it’s too late.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
“An exceptional novel . . . Engrossing . . . A tremendous accomplishment [and a] great triumph of novelistic imagination.”
—The Observer (London)
“Soulful and thoughtful . . . An impressively mature and wide-ranging book, both geographically and emotionally.”
—New York Times Book Review
“Undeniably graceful . . . It is vulnerability that makes The Journey Home so complete and appealing.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“With masterful skill and elegant prose, Olafsson gradually reveals his fierce heroine and her complicated story. The Journey Home is an eerie, suspenseful novel, one that delivers surprises until the very last beautiful page and that happily remains with the reader long after that.”
—Margot Livesey, author of Criminals and The Missing World
About the Author:
“Compelling . . . Akin to Thomas Mann . . . An astonishing story of confusion, loss, denial. Olafsson has created a woman of such complexity and uncalculated charm that he will leave readers wishing that they could actually meet her before it’s too late.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
“An exceptional novel . . . Engrossing . . . A tremendous accomplishment [and a] great triumph of novelistic imagination.”
—The Observer (London)
“Soulful and thoughtful . . . An impressively mature and wide-ranging book, both geographically and emotionally.”
—New York Times Book Review
“Undeniably graceful . . . It is vulnerability that makes The Journey Home so complete and appealing.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“With masterful skill and elegant prose, Olafsson gradually reveals his fierce heroine and her complicated story. The Journey Home is an eerie, suspenseful novel, one that delivers surprises until the very last beautiful page and that happily remains with the reader long after that.”
—Margot Livesey, author of Criminals and The Missing World
Olaf Olafsson was born in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1962. He studied physics as a Wien Scholar at Brandeis University. He is the author of two previous novels, The Journey Home and Absolution. His work has been translated into fourteen languages. He lives in New York City with his wife and two sons.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherPantheon
- Publication date2003
- ISBN 10 0375422544
- ISBN 13 9780375422546
- BindingHardcover
- Edition number1
- Number of pages272
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