Day Brings Back the Night

Day Brings Back the Night narrates a family story in the first person from the points of view of five characters as it explores the effects of intergenerational trauma and the power of intergenerational love. The novel begins in St. Paul, in 1989, with Part I, narrated from the point of view of Helen, a wife and mother, sorting through her papers and photographs, preparing for the move she and her family will make to their new home. The sorting brings back memories, and Helen relives her life, the emotional abuse and trauma she experienced, and her relationship with her husband, Tom, whose love saved her. In Part II, set in 2006 and narrated from Tom’s point of view, his daughter, Amanda, traps him in his car during their drive from St. Paul to a cabin in the Boundary Waters, so she can confront him with the questions that haunt her about her mother’s disappearance fifteen years earlier. Part III, set in that cabin in 2023, is narrated from the points of view of Tom, his second wife, Grace, Amanda, and her brother, Nicholas. Plagued by a past that has fractured them, the family struggles to understand, forgive, and remain a family. But can they?

PRAISE FOR DAY BRINGS BACK THE NIGHT

“A beautiful family love story set across generations.  Duren hauntingly captures the heartbreaking impossibility of family — the love it demands and the love it destroys.”

- Junot Diaz, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“Brian Duren has composed this novel as a song, a melody that carries from generation to generation the voices, visions, and scars a family has grown up with and will never leave behind. ”

- Cass Dalglish, novelist, Ring of Lions, and poet, Humming the Blues / Cantando los Blues (a boca cerrada).

“Day Brings Back the Night is an eloquent story of family tragedy and its aftermath. Using myriad voices, Duren deftly conveys one woman’s life and the pain and love she leaves in its wake. This novel is both an elegy and a triumph of a family’s journey finding their way back to each other, and to love. ”

- Cary Griffith, recipient of the Minnesota Book Award and the Midwest Book Award, is the author of nonfiction and fiction books that explore the natural world.

“This absorbing, intelligent, family drama plays out between Minnesota’s two polestars, the rich cultural life of Minneapolis, and escape to up-north cabin living. Duren’s finely rendered story of love and grief proves a universal truth: our past is never fully behind us.”

- Will Weaver, Minnesota Book Award winner and author of Power & Light and Black Dirt, Bright Stars