Blue Nights

A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Century

From one of our most powerful writers, a work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter. Richly textured with bits of her own childhood and married life with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter, Quintana Roo, this new book by Joan Didion examines her thoughts, fears, and doubts regarding having children, illness, and growing old.

Blue Nights opens on July 26, 2010, as Didion thinks back to Quintana's wedding in New York seven years before. Today would be her wedding anniversary. This fact triggers vivid snapshots of Quintana's childhood--in Malibu, in Brentwood, at school in Holmby Hills. Reflecting on her daughter but also on her role as a parent, Didion asks the candid questions any parent might about how she feels she failed either because cues were not taken or perhaps displaced. "How could I have missed what was clearly there to be seen?" Finally, perhaps we all remain unknown to each other. Seamlessly woven in are incidents Didion sees as underscoring her own age, something she finds hard to acknowledge, much less accept.

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.

Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
Published: 11/01/2011
ISBN: 9780307267672
Pages: 208
Weight: 0.71lbs
Size: 8.12h x 5.56w x 0.85d
Award: Indies Choice Book Awards - Honor Book

Review Citations: Kirkus Reviews 04/15/2011
Library Journal 06/01/2011 pg. 82
Library Journal Prepub Alert 06/01/2011 pg. 82
Booklist 09/01/2011 pg. 28
Library Journal 09/15/2011 pg. 75
Publishers Weekly 09/12/2011
People Weekly 09/26/2011 pg. 65
New York Review of Books 11/24/2011 pg. 6
Entertainment Weekly 11/11/2011 pg. 13
New York Times Book Review 11/06/2011 pg. 15
Publishers Weekly Best Books 11/07/2011 pg. 30
People Weekly 11/21/2011 pg. 48
Shelf Awareness 10/18/2011
New York Times Book Review 11/13/2011 pg. 50
NY Times Notable Bks of Year 12/04/2011 pg. 25
Kirkus Best Books 12/01/2011 pg. 2206
BookPage 11/01/2011