Arthur commented: " The End of Nightwork is a hugely impressive debut, one that very directly and fearlessly engages with some of the most pressing issues facing the world today. Arrested and imprisoned, Isao experiences a number of dream-visions in which he foresees his own death. While the fashionable narrative method of short, separated paragraph units sometimes impedes the prose, Pol’s understated wit is fine company. The leader of this popular movement predicts an imminent inter-generational conflict - father against son, mother against daughter - that echoes Playfere's own prophecies. If there is a flaw, and it's a significant one, it's that while there are common threads among the different elements and ideas, many of which would have supported a novel on their own, the ending of the novel rather peters out with the reader frustrated in their expectation that the story might draw them altogether.

The details of his sudden teenage transformation are startling: “They had to shave me every day, because the beard and body hair growth was so rapid it was getting in the way of the doctors who were trying to operate on me … They were trying to stop my head from growing too quickly. This book featured in the 2023 version of the influential annual Observer Best Debut Novelist feature (past years have included Natasha Brown, Caleb Azumah Nelson, Douglas Stuart, Sally Rooney, Rebecca Watson, Yara Rodrigues Fowler, JR Thorp Bonnie Garmus, Gail Honeyman among many others). The story of Pol (Polonius) and his family is indeed told in a way that is refreshing to read: well observed, clever dialogue (the girls in this book get some great lines! Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties.

The first party narrator of the book Pol(onius) was suspected up to the age of thirteen as suffering from delayed development/late onset puberty from He Hakari Neke syndrome whereby he suffered at age 13 a heterochronous shock – undergoing physical development that would normally take place between say 12 and 22 in just a few days.

What misery to be wise’ … Greg Hicks as Tiresias in The Oedipus Plays by Sophocles at the National Theatre in 1996. Having said that I would not necessarily say that it will be one of the best as I felt that the myriad of adjacent-ish ideas in it failed to completely coalesce by the end in the way that much of the novel seemed to promise. At one end, Pol’s condition; at the other, his obsession with the writings of English Civil War Puritan Bartholomew Playfere. Past, present and future; radioactive mutants, baseball, the Harlem River and the four horses of the apocalypse jostle each other for room in her effortlessly baroque sentences.

From mystics and soothsayers to madmen and mountebanks, prophets people many of my very favourite books and stories. And those that said to me why art thou come into Towne to make divisions were answered not by mine tongue but by the Lord who promiseth such fire as will cuppell His creation. He realises he has a “Unique Vantage Point” when it comes to the Kourists, finding himself simultaneously old and young.

The resulting book is a fascinating read, bursting with ideas, but not (unlike many similar debut novels) so stuffed with them that it overstays its welcome, coming in shy of 300 pages. In 1650 he had a religious experience which left him sprawling on his back in the back field of the farm that belonged to his father-in-law. The pandemic hurtled us from the end of one decade to the early years of another without pause for reflection, and we can’t quite connect who we are now with who we were – or what the world was – in the Before Times. That and Pol's obsessive interest in the writings of an obscure seventeenth-century Puritan prophet, Bartholomew Playfere, and his premonitions of ecological disaster and the end of the world.Pol’s medical condition (and frankly, his temperament) mean he doesn’t have a career so his work on Playfere becomes his identity, allowing him to claim status, intellect and purpose to their friends. With her last breath the grandmother blesses the Misfit unawares: “You’re one of my babies,” she says. Along with the various inventions that he brings to Macondo, Melquiades also delivers a series of prophecies, written on parchment in Sanskrit verse. The family of José Arcadio Buendía, living in the isolated town of Macondo, are visited by the mysterious Melquiades. He is depressed about the political direction of the world, governments’ inaction on climate change and the way his life has failed to match his hopes for it.