Night and Its Longings
by Philip Cioffari
Coming March 30th!
 

ISBN 978-1-60489-374-5, Trade Paper, $19.95

ISBN 978-1-60489-373-7, Hard Cover, $32

 

 

 

Synopsis:

Jake Garrett, a writer living in New York’s Greenwich Village, is paid a surprising late-night visit from the husband whose wife, Vera, Jake had an affair with ten years earlier. Even more surprising: the husband asks Jake to help find her, for she’s disappeared. Jake is thrust back into a world he thought had been lost to him forever. Jake’s undying love for Vera propels his search for her through the night-time streets of the city and, finally, to the remote beaches of the Carolina coast. This is a tale of lost love, adultery, and crime told in a taut, lyrical style—keeping the love story and the mystery inseparably intertwined. At its heart pulses the greatest mystery of all: the Self—why we do what we do, how we make amends for a life gone wrong, and how in the darkness of night, we see ourselves in the clearest light.  

 

 

"A marriage of a high-toned love story and a nuts-and-bolts mystery plot."

--Jonathan Dee, Pulitzer Prize Nominee for The Privileges.

 

 

 
About the Author:

Philip Cioffari is the author of the novels THE BRONX KILL; DARK ROAD, DEAD END; CATHOLIC BOYS; JESUSVILLE; IF ANYONE ASKS, SAY I DIED FROM THE HEARTBREAKING BLUES; and the story collection, A HISTORY OF THINGS LOST OR BROKEN, which won the Tartt First Fiction Prize, and the D. H. Lawrence award for fiction. His stories have been published widely in commercial and literary magazines and anthologies, including North American Review, Playboy, Michigan Quarterly Review, Northwest Review, Florida Fiction, and Southern Humanities Review. He has written and directed for Off and Off-Off Broadway. His Indie feature film, which he wrote and directed, LOVE IN THE AGE OF DION, has won numerous awards, including Best Feature Film at the Long Island Int’l Film Expo, and Best Director at the NY Independent Film & Video Festival. He was a Professor of English, and Director of the Performing and Literary Arts Honors Program, at William Paterson University. He now teaches for Gotham Writers in New York City. http://www.philipcioffari.com

 


 


Excerpt from Book:

1

 

            One chance, that’s how I saw it.

For love, the true kind.

One chance.

Play hard, play to win. You blow it, well, you spend the rest of your life alone. Or you drift, ghost-haunted, woman to woman. Which pretty much summed up my life since Vera and I split. I thought love, the enduring sort, had kissed me goodbye.

Past midnight, that’s the way you think. The way I think.

I was hunched over the typewriter, re-reading the last lines I’d written: another of my hardboiled detective stories with what I liked to think of as a metaphysical edge. The street was dark and empty. Morrison moved to the head of the alley. He hesitated before its long tunnel of shadows. He’d always been wary of dark places. Too many childhood nightmares. Memories, too. But he pushed those aside. He knew he had to face what awaited him—the gunman or one of his victims. And now he moved into the alley itself, snub-nosed revolver in hand. . .

Downstairs someone was knocking.

No one came at this hour. Not even Connie, the woman I was seeing at the time. Yet the knocking continued.

From my window the caller was hidden by the leaves of a beech tree. What I could see was the courtyard below and the narrow alley, dark with shadow, leading to the street.

My door opened directly into the courtyard. Outside, framed against the newly green fluorescence of the beech, stood a man of medium build with thinning, sand-colored hair, his face partially in leaf-shadow. Leaning toward me. Hands shoved deep in his pockets. Shoulders trembling though it was a mild night that smelled of flowers and courtyard grass.

“How are you, Jake?” he said. “I deeply apologize for the intrusion at this ungodly hour, but I saw your light was on and—” He stared at me like a man clinging to a lifeboat. “And so I knew you were still up, still writing. You see, I’ve been here before, the past few nights, watching from the alley.”

He stopped himself and shrugged in apology. “That sounds awful, I know. I’m sorry. I’m no stalker. It’s just that. . .I could see you in the window, typing, so I knew—”

He left the sentence hanging and thrust out his hand. “It’s Norm Davison.”

It took a moment to connect the face to the man I’d known.

“Vera’s husband,” he said. “I didn’t know who else to turn to.”