The release date for the English version of 'Blue Nights' by
Joan Didion is Nov 2011. If you enjoy this novel, it is available for buy as a paperback from Barnes & Noble or Indigo, as an ebook on the Amazon Kindle store, or as an audiobook on Audible.
A piece of breathtaking frankness about losing a daughter from one of our most powerful authors. Joan Didion's work, richly interwoven with fragments of her own upbringing and married life with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter, Quintana Roo, explores her ideas, anxieties, and misgivings about being a mother, becoming sick, and aging.
On July 26, 2010, Blue Nights premieres, with Didion reflecting on Quintana's wedding in New York seven years before. Her wedding anniversary is today. This information brings up vivid memories of Quintana's early years—in Brentwood, in Malibu, and at her Holmby Hills school. Didion raises the open questions any parent may when thinking back on her daughter and her position as a parent, sharing how she believes she failed either because signs were ignored or perhaps misinterpreted. "How could I have failed to notice what was so obviously there?" In the end, maybe none of us knows the other. Events that Didion perceives as highlighting her own age are subtly weaved throughout; this is something she finds difficult to recognize, much less embrace.
Blue Nights—the long, light evening hours that signal the summer solstice, “the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but also its warning”—like The Year of Magical Thinking before it, is an iconic book of incisive and electric honesty, haunting and profoundly moving.