Dark Is the Morning

“A love story, set in the modern world but steeped in antiquity…[a] moving elegy to innocence.” —Wall Street Journal

“Thomson is in his element when it comes to describing the disintegration of people’s lives…It’s as if he has smuggled a thriller under the cool skin of literary fiction…You could finish Dark Is the Morning in one long, sweltering afternoon. It is perhaps the ideal holiday read: frictionless at the level of the sentence; stealthy, romantic, and utterly unpredictable in every other way.” —Financial Times

“Thomson captures with remarkable precision the exhilaration and vulnerability of falling in love…Dark Is the Morning is a haunting exploration of how love can become entangled with insecurity, and how the longing for certainty can tip into destructive obsession…a novel of unsettling power.” —Times Literary Supplement

“A quiet, subtle, persuasive novel about toxic jealousy…It’s not densely plotted, not filled with large-scale twists; [Thomson] relies instead on meticulous detail, on compelling portraiture…[a] deft exploration of the awful human consequences of male frailty.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Each novel Rupert Thomson writes is a new vision of a new world; he’s the least predictable, the most surprising of writers. I don’t know how he does it.” —Philip Pullman, author of the bestselling His Dark Materials trilogy

“Lyrical, intense, and haunting, Thomson’s Italian psychodrama displays incredible narrative mastery and has the elegance and fluency of a fable. So beautifully written.” —Chloe Aridjis, author of Sea Monsters

“A wonderfully moody, moving novel, shot through with sadness and with strangeness, and with a simmering power entirely its own.” —Sarah Waters, author of Fingersmith

“Beautiful and seething.” —Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Pond and Checkout 19

“Utterly gripping. There isn’t a writer on the planet who mines the precariousness of the human condition with such terrifying clarity and power.” —Julie Myerson, author of Nonfiction