The Lost Night: A memoir

by Rachel Howard

On June 22,1986, Stan Howard was stabbed in his bed, his ten-year-old daughter Rachel sleeping in the next room. Unable to fully process the tragedy, Rachel coped the only way she knew how by trying to pretend the murder never happened. More then fifteen years later, Rachel became engaged, and the need to confront the night of her father's death before entering the next phase of her life grew strong. Her father's murder remained unsolved, and many questions unanswered and unasked. In The Lost Night, Rachel shares her father's story, and her keen investigation of memory, truth, and how a family moves on from a tragedy for which they may never find the answers. “The Lost Night is enthralling, a skillfully narrated story that begins as a tale of detection but becomes something more.” —The New York Times “No novel based on Ms. Howard's life, no matter how skillfully crafted, could have been as believable as The Lost Night. It is a quintessentially American narrative of self-creation and redemption, a postmodern Gatsby with a hard-earned, doubt-tinged happy ending. I don't know when I've read a better first book.” —The Wall Street Journal “Powerful.” —San Francisco Chronicle, named one of the Chronicle's best books of 2005 “The Lost Night illuminates a bond between a father and a daughter that neither time nor death can undo.” —The Washington Post Book World

246 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 14, 2019

About the author

Rachel Howard's debut novel, The Risk of Us, will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt April 2019. She is also the author of a memoir, The Lost Night, and her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in ZYZZYVA, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Gulf Coast, the New Yorker online, and the New York Times. She lives in Nevada City, California.

Reviews

[Chantel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked this book! It was moving to read about how a murder affects a family member of the victim, especially in a case like this that hasn't been solved.