Chris Adrian

A modern retelling of A Midsummer Night's Dream follows the experiences of three people on the run from failed relationships who are transformed by a grieving faerie queen and a scheming homeless man. By the author of The Children's Hospital. 50,000 first printing.

A Novel

The Great Night

Opens with the world ending under seven sudden miles of water. The survivors are those caught on a random night in a very unusual children's hospital. Part tales of and by an unlikely hero of a medical student, part mythic narrative as thought by the recording angel responsible for watching and crhonicling events that represent a third covenant of God with the world.

The children's hospital

Eli Horowitz

What does love feel like beyond death? Jane's husband Jim has just died - or not quite. For Jim, a mild-mannered chaplain at the hospital where Jane works as a surgeon, has left his body to Polaris, a shadowy cryonics organisation that promises to do away with mortality forever. Stranded in the realm of the living, reeling from the loss of her husband, Jane sets out to confront Polaris and to discover just where, exactly, his body is now. Meanwhile, awake in a strange new world, an afterlife of sorts, his body gone but his consciousness intact, Jim learns that the cost of eternal life is higher than he ever could have imagined. As the narratives of husband and wife - one alive, one dead; one faithful, one errant - intertwine and loop from after-life to pre-death, so an extraordinary portrait of a marriage emerges; its losses, its secrets, its fidelities, its endurance. Beautifully constructed, thought-provoking, emotionally profound and witty, The New World is a pitch-perfect exploration of the power of love and the triumph of human connection over technological tyranny. It is a fantastical, funny and tender response to that most profound of marriage vows: til death to us part.

The New World

Surviving in a floating hospital after the earth is flooded beneath seven miles of water, medical student Jemma Claflin finds herself possessed of strange powers that lead to an understanding of her frightening destiny.

The Children's Hospital

Children's Hospital

The stories in A Better Angel describe the terrain of human suffering—illness, regret, mourning, sympathy—in the most unusual of ways. In “Stab,” a bereaved twin starts a friendship with a homicidal fifth grader in the hope that she can somehow lead him back to his dead brother. In “Why Antichrist?” a boy tries to contact the spirit of his dead father and finds himself talking to the Devil instead. In the remarkable title story, a ne’er do well pediatrician returns home to take care of his dying father, all the while under the scrutiny of an easily-disappointed heavenly agent. With Gob’s Grief and The Children’s Hospital, Chris Adrian announced himself as a writer of rare talent and originality. The stories in A Better Angel, some of which have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, and McSweeney’s, demonstrate more of his endless inventiveness and wit, and they confirm his growing reputation as a most exciting and unusual literary voice—of heartbreaking, magical, and darkly comic tales.

Stories

A Better Angel

In the summer of 1863, Gob and Tomo Woodhull, eleven-year-old twins, agree to forsake their home and family for the glories of the Union Army. But on the night of their departure, Gob suffers a change of heart, and Tomo leaves his brother behind. When Tomo is shot clean through the eye in his very first battle, Gob is left to endure the guilt and grief that will later come to fuel his obsession with building a vast machine that will bring Tomo - indeed, all the Civil War dead - back to life.

Gob's Grief

Un angelo migliore

In the summer of 1863, Gob and Tomo Woodhull, eleven-year-old twin sons of Victoria Woodhull, agree to together forsake their home and family in Licking County, Ohio, for the glories of the Union Army. But on the night of their departure for the war, Gob suffers a change of heart, and Tomo is forced to leave his brother behind. Tomo falls in as a bugler with the Ninth Ohio Volunteers and briefly revels in camp life; but when he is shot clean through the eye in his very first battle, Gob is left to endure the guilt and grief that will later come to fuel his obsession with building a vast machine that will bring Tomo–indeed, all the Civil War dead–back to life. Epic in scope yet emotionally intimate, Gob’s Grief creates a world both fantastic and familiar and populates it with characters who breath on the page, capturing the spirit of a fevered nation populated with lost brothers and lost souls.

Acclaimed as a "gifted, courageous writer"(The New York Times), Chris Adrian brings all his extraordinary talents to bear in The Great Night—a brilliant and mesmerizing retelling of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream." On Midsummer Eve 2008, three people, each on the run from a failed relationship, become trapped in San Francisco's Buena Vista Park, the secret home of Titania, Oberon, and their court. On this night, something awful is happening in the faerie kingdom: in a fit of sadness over the end of her marriage, which broke up in the wake of the death of her adopted son, Titania has set loose an ancient menace, and the chaos that ensues will threaten the lives of immortals and mortals alike. Selected by The New Yorker as one the best young writers in America, Adrian has created a singularly playful, heartbreaking, and humorous novel—a story that charts the borders between reality and dreams, love and magic, and mortality and immortality.

Years after his young brother, Tomo, is killed during the Civil War, a grieving Gob Woodhull, the son of nineteenth-century feminist Victoria Woodhull, now studying to become a doctor, concocts a scheme to build a machine that can restore all the war dead to life. A first novel. Reader's Guide available. Reprint. 30,000 first printing.

Nella notte piú lunga dell'anno tre persone si addentrano nel Buena Vista Park di San Francisco dirette a una festa. Tutte e tre vorrebbero cosí alleviare la ferita di un amore perduto, ma alla festa non arriveranno mai. Perché è la notte di mezza estate, notte di sogno e magia, notte ideale perché il destino dei mortali s'intrecci con quello degli immortali e ne sia per sempre alterato. Come nella commedia di Shakespeare, solo l'amore potrà travalicare i regni e scongiurare il caos. A patto di essere disposti a pagarne il prezzo. *** «Per Chris Adrian la vita è appassionata esplorazione delle sole cose che contano e la scrittura è compagna di viaggio e riferimento, interprete e guida, attraverso un territorio ignoto ad altri occhi umani. Ogni suo resoconto da quelle regioni arricchisce e dilata la nostra comprensione del mondo che credevamo di conoscere». Marilynne Robinson

La grande notte

One Midsummer’s Eve, 2008, three people, each on the run from a failed relationship, are trapped in San Francisco’s Buena Vista Park on their way to a party. And on this night, something awful is happening in the faerie kingdom. In a fit of sadness over the end of her marriage and the death of her adopted son, Titania has set loose an ancient menace, and the chaos that ensues upends and threatens the lives of mortals and immortals alike. The three heartbroken lovers become lost in the park, under the park and within the memories of the people they lost or drove away, and each will remember through the course of the night that this is not the first time their lives have been touched by magic. Suffering an all-too-human despair, and in thrall to an old enemy, Titania puts all the resources of her kingdom at the disposal of a homeless man who thinks he can bring down the sinister mayor of San Francisco by staging a musical production of Soylent Green. Before the night ends the mortals are caught, the show is staged and Titania discovers, at great cost, a way to undo the menace she’s set free, if not to undo her grief.

Great Night

Nathalie Bru

Libre transposition dans le San Francisco d'aujourd'hui du Songe d'une nuit d'été, le roman de Chris Adrian est un livre surprenant, où réalité et féerie se télescopent pour interroger la nature exacte de l'amour. Henry, Will et Molly ne se connaissent pas mais ils ont quelque chose en commun. Tous trois viennent de perdre un être cher dans la mort ou la rupture. Un soir d'été, tandis qu'ils se rendent à une soirée, ils s'égarent dans Buena Vista Park sans savoir que ce lieu est devenu le refuge secret de Titania et Obéron, les souverains du royaume légendaire immortalisés dans la pièce de Shakespeare, inconsolables depuis la mort de leur fils... Ensemble, ils vont vivre une nuit à nulle autre pareille. À l'image d'Obéron, doté du pouvoir de sonder le coeur humain, Chris Adrian explore la puissance et le mystère de l'amour, se jouant de la frontière entre mythe et réalité, grâce et gravité. Il réussit un roman drôle et émouvant, d'une inventivité rarement égalée. « Un roman extraordinaire, imaginatif et d'une terrifiante beauté. » Library Journal « Chris Adrian nous ouvre l'esprit et bouleverse notre façon d'appréhender le monde. » Marilynne Robinson

Chris Adrian

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