“Ladner’s gritty debut looks at the fringes of human functionality and underworld London, ultimately asking if we can escape ourselves by becoming someone else.”
— Listed by The Face, ‘The Best New Novelists to Keep on Your Radar’
“One of the most exciting and provocative debuts. . . Daring and dark, it explores themes of nihilism, escape, and desire, with classic noir echoes of Patricia Highsmith. Is it possible to become someone else? What are the consequences of doing so? Fearless in subject matter and stylistically brave, this is not a novel I’m going to forget anytime soon.”
Julianne Pachico, author of The Anthill
“A darkly compulsive debut, charged with the vertigo of sleeplessness, intoxication and obsessive intimacy.”
Naomi Booth, author of Exit Management
In the late nineties in a semi-affordable, semi-constructed London, twenty-three-year-old Meggie meets the enigmatic and glamorous Sabine. Dissatisfied with the state of her life – her steady relationship with her reliable boyfriend and her humdrum job in media monitoring – Meggie recognizes in Sabine the person she would like to be. Entirely entranced, Meggie gives up the trappings of a normal life in favour of working the nightshift to be with Sabine; to be like Sabine. In time, Meggie becomes all-consumed by her idolization, and, caught in a whirlwind of obsession, finds herself gradually annihilating her sense of self, immersed in Sabine’s unreliable and unpredictable parallel world.
As intoxicating as it is frightening, Kiare Ladner’s Nightshift is an entirely gripping exploration of obsessive attraction, of lives lived outside the mainstream and of those who live by night . . .
Purchase Nightshift (UK)
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Purchase Nightshift (US)
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“Ladner sustains a deliriously lurid rabbit hole for Meggie to go down as she fixates on her unreliable ‘fairy tale friend’ who she longs not only to know but also to be. The result is a tense and affecting tale of awakening.”
— Publishers Weekly
“Debut novelist Ladner has darkness in her bones… Nightshift has atmosphere to spare, and the unstable friendship at its core is rendered with the right amount of moodiness.”
— CrimeReads
* more reviews here. . .*