"This stunning debut novel explores the space between dreams and nightmares, life and death, the brilliance of the midnight sun and the darkness when you shut your eyes."

—Julia Phillips, author of the National Book Award Finalist DISAPPEARING EARTH
"A mesmerizing, disturbing, and heart-wrenching read about loneliness and grief. Diane Zinna writes sentences that will break you, and then suddenly everything on the page lights up again..."

—Natalie Jenner, author of THE JANE AUSTEN SOCIETY
"A book that shows how coming-of-age and elegy can be the same story."

—Emily Fridlund, author of the Booker Prize finalist HISTORY OF WOLVES

"Zinna offers everything I come to a novel hoping for—a compelling protagonist, graceful prose, first-rate storytelling, and deep compassion for her characters."

—Lori Ostlund, author of AFTER THE PARADE

AUTHOR OF THE ALL-NIGHT SUN

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THE ALL-NIGHT SUN

A lonely young woman gets too close to her charismatic female student in a propulsive debut culminating in a dangerously debauched Midsommar’s Eve–for readers of Julie Buntin’s Marlena and Emily Fridlund’s History of Wolves.

Lauren Cress teaches writing at a small college outside of Washington, DC. In the classroom, she is poised, smart, and kind, well-liked by her students and colleagues. But in her personal life, Lauren is troubled and isolated, still grappling with the sudden death of her parents ten years earlier. She seems to exist at a remove from everyone around her until a new student joins her class: charming, magnetic Siri, who appears to be everything Lauren wishes she could be. They fall headlong into an all-consuming friendship that feels to Lauren like she is reclaiming her lost adolescence.

When Siri invites her along on a trip home to Sweden for the summer, Lauren impulsively accepts, intrigued by how Siri describes it: “Everything will be green, fresh, new, just thawing out.” But once there, Lauren finds herself drawn to Siri’s enigmatic, brooding brother Magnus. Siri is resentful, and Lauren starts to see a new side of her friend: selfish, reckless, self-destructive, even cruel. On the last night of her trip, Lauren accompanies Siri and her friends on a seaside camping trip to celebrate Midsommar’s Eve, a night when no one sleeps, boundaries blur, and under the light of the unsetting sun, things take a dark turn.

Ultimately Lauren must acknowledge the truth of what happened with Siri and come to terms with her own tragic past in this gorgeously written, deeply felt debut about the transformative relationships that often come to us when things feel darkest.

PRAISE

“Inventive and luminous . . . ­­­­­Zinna’s intimate debut dazzles with original language, emotional sentience, and Swedish folklore as it plumbs the depths of grief, loss, and friendship . . . Zinna reaches an inspired emotional depth that, as the title signifies, never stops blazing.”Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Zinna’s stunning debut novel is a twisting tale of grief, hope and self-deceit, a story as mesmerizing as the young women at its heart.” BookPage (starred review) 

“An unsettling, mesmerizing debut, which starts off on a small college campus and ends with a seaside camping trip in Sweden. In gently hypnotic prose, Zinna beautifully explores the transformative powers of grief, loneliness, intimate friendships, and the hunger we have to be understood.” 
Refinery 29’s Best Summer Books of 2020

“This stunning debut novel explores the space between dreams and nightmares, life and death, the brilliance of the midnight sun and the darkness when you shut your eyes. Diane Zinna has given us a tender, aching, and unforgettable story.”
—Julia Phillips, Author of the National Book Award Finalist Disappearing Earth

“Diane Zinna’s The All-Night Sun is an unexpected love story–about rebirth after loss, about the human connections that art and literature enable, about the adventures we undertake and the tales we tell ourselves to get by. It’s also about risk and sorrow, about how our stories can fatefully mask reality. This is a memorable and meaningful novel.” 
—Claire Messud, New York Times bestselling author of The Burning Girl

“Diane Zinna carves her sentences on the page. This book is compulsively readable because no scene or paragraph goes to waste; each nuance of thought and feeling gets traced with generous intensity. Zinna renders all the vivid saturations of grief, but not just that: She also traces the complicated fretwork of young friendship. This book shows how coming-of-age and elegy can be the same story.”
—Emily Fridlund, Author of the Booker Prize Finalist History of Wolves

“The All-Night Sun illuminates the unwieldy paths the human mind will follow when chased by grief, loneliness, and the failure of memory. In lyrical, dreamlike prose, Diane Zinna’s mångata leads her characters from profound loss to the promise of wounds healed. An impressive debut by a gifted writer.”
Chris Cander, Author of The Weight of a Piano

“Sensuous and hypnotic, The All-Night Sun reveals the many ways in which grief can distort one’s judgement and even one’s allegiance to the truth. Diane Zinna has gifted an empathic prose-poem to anyone who has felt displaced by loss and in search of a path out of the stalemate of memory.”
Pamela Erens, Author of Eleven Hours

“A mesmerizing, disturbing, and heart-wrenching read about loneliness and grief. Diane Zinna writes sentences that will break you, and then suddenly everything on the page lights up again, and you go on the rollercoaster that is love, and loss, and life. With poetic and hypnotic prose, The All-Night Sun is an essential addition to fiction on grief and a compelling story about female friendship, its limits and constraints, and the surprising ways it can make us whole.” 
—Natalie Jenner, Author of The Jane Austen Society

“The All-Night Sun is a provocative examination of the often-blurred boundaries between teacher and student as well as the disorienting effects of grief. Using language so suffused with light and color it’s hard to look away from her words, Diane Zinna writes movingly about family, friendship, psychic black holes, and the ways in which art and writing can ameliorate the damage life etches on us all.”
—Jennifer Steil, Author of Exile Music

“The All-Night Sun is a testament to the power of storytelling. In much the same way that she pursues her emptiness across an ocean, the rawness of Lauren’s pain will have readers chasing her through the pages. The lies she tells herself — and others — about her past become the ghosts which simultaneously accuse and exonerate her. As she unravels and cuts through the tangles of her experience, we can’t help but cheer.” 
Benjamin Ludwig, Author of Ginny Moon

“Diane Zinna has written a mesmerizing story of how grief can pull us together while pulling us under. She is a writer deft with a paintbrush of words illustrating the dark hues of the deepest emotions. Her brilliant story is the heartfelt tale of Lauren and Siri, both orphans with pain shadowing their futures, which sends them on a journey together. Throughout the novel, we never quit wondering if they or their friendship will survive. The All-Night Sun is a gorgeous tribute to grief in all its forms, and how we have to go through it to get to the other side—there’s no way around it.” 
Amy Wallen, Author of When We Were Ghouls: A Memoir of Ghost Stories

“The All-Night Sun is about loss, guilt, faith, friendship, and, as the title also suggests, the human ability to go on. Zinna offers everything I come to a novel hoping for—a compelling protagonist, graceful prose, first-rate storytelling, and deep compassion for her characters.”
Lori Ostlund, Author of After the Parade

“The All-Night Sun holds, at its heart, illumination: what is shown, what is held in the light, which is also to say that what is hidden, what is kept in shadow, is also necessarily part of its project. The All-Night Sun does not disappoint; the interplay between the secrets the characters keep and their moments of revelatory intimacy create a striking chiaroscuro effect that is as much about the power of storytelling—its power to deceive and transgress as much as to soothe and heal—as it is about what and how we grieve.”
—Holly M. Wendt for The Rumpus
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