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finalist for ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year Award, 2008
The Night Battles, by M.F. Bloxam
Published in December 2008, Hardcover, 240 pages
ISBN 978-1-57962-171-1
A novel of psychological suspense, in the tradition of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, it has already won the Individual Artist Fellowship Award from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts. It tells the tale of Joan Severance, an American historian and anthropologist who’s never been able to get over her own history. Her mother was a famous Italian crime scene photographer who was murdered by the Mafia when Joan was 17. Her father, a prominent American archaeologist, took her from Sicily and her reckless mother when she was 7. Two decades after her mother’s death she returns to Sicily, lured by the promise of extraordinary archives newly opened in the remote fortress town of Valparuta, while escaping from an academic career in tatters. There she meets the archivist Cosimo Chiesa, who’s as dangerous as he is charismatic, and falls in love with him. She will be taken deep into the violent spirit world of Sicilian folklore, as well as the Sicilian world of the Mafia which is very different from the American, and ultimately comes to understand her own hybrid and conflicted nature. The writing is reminiscent of Joyce Hackett’s. The balance between the real world and the spirit world Sicilian folklore is mesmerizing. The Night Battles maps landscapes—real and imagined—where dream and belief, memory and longing, desire and obsession converge.
"Bloxam’s ornate prose is the perfect complement to her complex heroine and the creepy goings-on in this eerie and satisfying debut novel."
—Publishers Weekly
“With the finesse and timing of a skilled athlete, M.F. Bloxam unravels the rigid defenses of an American archivist by placing her in a Sicilian village where medieval spirits—allied with the townspeople—engage in epic battles between good and evil. Reminiscent of Daphne du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now, Bloxam’s masterful blending of psychological undercurrents with compelling narrative results in a beautifully balanced work which will haunt the reader long after the last page is turned.” —Haila Williams, Blackstone Audiobooks
Nominated for the 2008 National Book Award, Pulitzer, PEN/Hemingway, PEN/Faulkner, and National Book Critics Circle Award.
Audio rights sold to Blackstone Audiobooks
Price: $28.00
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