Press Release: The Night Strangers by Chris Bohjalian
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
For more information, contact:
Sarah Breivogel, 212-572-2722
From New York Times bestselling author of The Double Bind, Skeletons at the Feast, and Midwives comes a riveting and dramatic ghost story.
THE NIGHT STRANGERS
A Novel by Chris Bohjalian
“A genre-defying novel, both a compelling story of a family in trauma and a psychological thriller that is truly frightening . . . Fans of Alice Sebold and Margaret Atwood will find similar appeal here.” —Library Journal (starred review)
“A page-turner of uncommon depth. Guilt, egotism, and fear all play parts in the genre-bending novel.” —Booklist(starred review)
“Put a haunted man in a haunted house . . . and you have a Halloween hair-raiser. But it’s more than that. Bohjalian, with a dozen well-received novels to his credit, understands trauma: how long it takes to recover from unimaginable pain, and how people who have never experienced it rarely understand.” —Tim Clark, Yankee Magazine
“Compelling . . . a practical magick horror story.” —Kirkus Reviews
“A gripping, paranormal thriller . . . Bohjalian is a master, and the slow-mounting dread makes this a frightful ride.” —Publishers Weekly
In the past two decades, Chris Bohjalian has tried mightily to defy expectations and never write the same novel twice. The result has been work as diverse as the criticallyacclaimed Skeletons at the Feast, a wrenching exploration of one family’s complicity in the Holocaust, to The Double Bind, a twisting tale of a young woman’s madness after a violent sexual assault. And, of course, he will always be known for Midwives, the now classic saga of a midwife’s trial for manslaughter—told from the perspective of her daughter.
His new novel, THE NIGHT STRANGERS (Crown Publishers, October 4, 2011), stemmed from two random events in his life that occurred years apart. In 1987, when Bohjalian purchased his 1898 Victorian home, he was puzzled to find a door in the basement sealed shut with six-inch-long carriage bolts. Behind it? Nothing. It was, as Bohjalian recalled, eerily reminiscent of a crypt. He put it back in place, but he knew even then that someday that door would be the entrance to a novel: a ghost story.
Twenty-two years later in January 2009, pilot Sully Sullenberger dominated the headlines after he successfully landed his crippled Airbus in the Hudson River. Dubbed “the Miracle on the Hudson,” Bohjalian saw a novel here as well—albeit one with a far darker ending.
When pilot Chip Linton is forced to ditch his regional jet in Lake Champlain due to double engine failure, he and his wife, Emily, move to a rambling Victorian house in northern New Hampshire with their ten-year-old twin daughters, hoping to rebuild their lives. Unlike Sullenberger’s successful water landing, most of the people aboard Flight 1611 perish on impact or drown. The body count? Thirty-nine—a coincidence not lost on Chip when he discovers a door in the basement of their new home that leads to nowhere, sealed shut with exactly 39 six-inch-long carriage bolts. As he struggles to cope with the aftermath of the crash, Chip soon finds himself haunted—first by the litany of what-ifs and then by the passengers and crew who died in the water.
Meanwhile, Chip’s wife, Emily, is wondering about the strange women in this sparsely populated White Mountain village, self-proclaimed herbalists, and why they are so interested in her fifth-grade twin daughters. Are they mad? Are they really making tinctures in the greenhouses that populate the town or are they practicing witchcraft? Or is it her husband, in the wake of the tragedy, whose grip on sanity has become desperately tenuous?
THE NIGHT STRANGERS is a page-turning ghost story with all the hallmarks readers have come to expect from Bohjalian: a palpable sense of place, meticulous research, an unerring sense of the demons that drive us, and characters we care about deeply. The difference this time? Some of those characters are dead.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHRIS BOHJALIAN is the critically acclaimed author of fourteen books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Double Bind, Secrets of Eden, and Skeletons at the Feast. His novel Midwives was a number one New York Times bestseller and a selection of Oprah’s Book Club. His work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages, and two of his novels have become movies (Midwives and Past the Bleachers). His third, Secrets of Eden, will air on Lifetime Television on November 21, 2011. He lives in Vermont with his wife and daughter.
THE NIGHT STRANGERS
by Chris Bohjalian
Crown Publishers • On sale: October 4, 2011
Price: $25.00 hardcover• Pages: 400 • ISBN: 978-0-307-39499-6
Also available in large print, audio, and electronic versions