All-Night Sun

“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 “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 that 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 The Ambassador’s Wife

“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 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

“Sensuous and hypnotic, The All-Night Sun reveals the many ways in which grief can distort one’s judgment 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 is 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 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 E. Wallen, author of When We Were Ghouls: A Memoir of Ghost Stories

“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 mangata 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

Diane Zinna works for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, which hosts the largest literary conference in North America. In 2014, Diane created the Writer to Writer Mentorship Program, which has since served nearly six hundred writers. She is also developing the #WritersServe project to spotlight free writing workshops in community settings. She received her MFA from the University of Florida and taught creative writing for ten years. She lives in Fairfax, VA, with her husband and daughter.

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