The Longest Night

A taut and uncanny thriller about one girl’s search for home, melding time travel, magic realism, horror, and literary suspense.

One forty-below December night, 18-year-old Ash Hayes finds herself locked out of her family home in rural Minnesota. She seeks shelter from the freezing cold and certain death at the closest house on the road, with neighbours she hasn’t yet met.

The next morning, everything is off-kilter - the neighbours’ house has no mirrors or modern technology, and all the windows blocked. When Ash tries to call her parents, their numbers are disconnected. One of the strange inhabitants there is a doctor, who offers Ash a terrible form of help and won’t take no for an answer. In her efforts to get out of the house and back to her regular life, though, Ash finds herself transported to an even stranger place and time, setting off a chain of events that connect with (and alter) her past and her future.

For fans of Mona Awad and Emily St. John Mandel, The Longest Night is a high-stakes, genre-twisting story about searching for something stable in a world where reality is ever-changing and can’t be trusted.

Lauren Carter is the author of two novels, a collection of short stories, and two poetry collections. Her work has appeared in multiple journals and anthologies, including Best Canadian Stories, and won several awards, including the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction, the Prairie Fire Literary Awards and the Room Magazine Poetry Contest. She grew up in Blind River, ON, and has lived in the Greater Toronto Area and The Pas, MB. She currently resides in St. Andrews, MB.