The All-Night Sun

“[An] unsettling, mesmerizing debut … In gently hypnotic prose, Zinna beautifully explores the transformative powers of grief, loneliness, intimate friendships, and the hunger we have to be understood.”—Refinery29

“Explosive.”—Electric Literature

“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

“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 Disappearing Earth

“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 History of Wolves

“Sensuous and hypnotic… 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 and The Virgins

“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

“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

“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

“A provocative examination of the often-blurred boundaries between teacher and student, as well as the disorienting effects of grief, written in language so suffused with light and color that it’s hard to look away from Zinna’s words.”—Jennifer Stiel, author of Exile Music

“In The All-Night Sun, author Diane Zinna displays her deep understanding of the writing craft….Her 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)

“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 [and] reaches an inspired emotional depth that, as the title signifies, never stops blazing.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Diane Zinna is originally from Long Island, New York. She received her MFA from the University of Florida and has taught writing workshops for more than a decade. She formerly worked at AWP, the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, and in 2014, Diane created the Writer to Writer Mentorship Program, helping to match more than six hundred writers over twelve seasons. Diane has become well-known for her popular, online grief writing sessions that have grown each Sunday since the start of the pandemic. Diane lives in Fairfax, Virginia, with her husband and daughter. The All-Night Sun is her first novel.

This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.