Faithful and Virtuous Night

Description

Recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2020
Shortlisted for the 2014 Forward Prize for Best Collection
Shortlisted for the 2014 T.S. Eliot Prize

You enter the world of this spellbinding book through one of its many dreamlike portals, and each time you enter it’s the same place but it has been arranged differently. You were a woman. You were a man. This is a story of adventure, an encounter with the unknown, a knight’s undaunted journey into the kingdom of death; this is a story of the world you’ve always known, that first primer where ‘on page three, a dog appeared. / On page five, there was a ball’, and every familiar facet has been made to shimmer like the contours of a dream, ‘the dog float[ing] into sky to join the ball’. Faithful and Virtuous Night tells a single story, but the parts are mutable, the great sweep of it’s narrative mysterious and fateful, heartbreaking and charged with wonder.