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What’s with these Scandinavian authors and a preternatural ability to craft a story? Popular thriller writer Hildur Knútsdóttir produces an astonishingly gripping plot in her latest offering The Night Guest. Conjuring up the most horrid of stories, and yet treading the path of alluring sophistication and simplicity, Knútsdóttir comes up triumphant in more ways than one.
Iðunn, a resident of Reykjavík is plagued with constant fatigue and lassitude. Every morning, she is a ton of bricks as she wakes up. Non localized pains hammer her joints to add to inexplicable scars and bruises. Iðunn manifests herself at the doorstep of doctors and psychiatrists seeking a remedy to her mysterious ailment. Exasperated and overcome by a feeling of understandable hopelessness, Iðunn decides to take matters into her own hands, by strapping a GPS enabled watch to her wrist.
What transpires next bewilders Iðunn no end. The GPS on her watch reveals that she has walked a mindboggling 40,000 steps. Has she been sleepwalking? If yes where? Why? Night after night the active GPS faithfully tracks Nadia’s footfalls. Every single time the destination is the same – Grandi harbour. A perplexed and lost Iðunn decides to abdicate sleep. Taking recourse to long and aimless walks and binge television watching, she always strives to remain awake. But how long can a human being resist the lures of Hypnos? When she finally succumbs to the forces of exhaustion, the dreaded GPS becomes hyperactive and yet again the harbour at Grandi beckons.
When the cats prowling the area where Iðunn resides start to vanish in thin air (yes you read that right), things begin to take a nasty turn from being merely mysterious to downright macabre. Grandi holds more secrets than what is either desirable or digestible. Things climax to a crescendo when Iðunn decides to face her fears for the last time by making her way to Grandi, but in a perfectly sane and alert state.
The Night Guest is a stirring testimony to the limitless and boundaryless capabilities of the human imagination. Ingenious in its sweep and spontaneous in its wake, it is a work which would make people sit up and take notice of this splendid author. Juxtaposing despair with psychological debilitation, the book is also an indirect exhortation for addressing the pernicious evil of depression. No amount of appreciation would do justice to Mary Robinette Kowal for her spectacular work with the translation. She succeeds superbly in keeping her readers riveted and glued to every page, paragraph, and phrase.
A virtually ‘unputdownable’ read, The Night Guest, is a book that would linger in the minds of its readers long after the covers have been closed.
The Night Guest is published by the Tor Publishing Group and will be available on sale beginning 10th September 2024.
Thank you, Net Galley for the Advance Reviewer Copy!
