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The Longest Night

By (author): Lauren Carter

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, 19-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.


AUTHOR

Lauren Carter

Lauren Carter is the author of four previous books of fiction and poetry, including This Has Nothing to Do with You, winner of the 2020 Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction. She has also received the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer. Her debut novel, Swarm, was longlisted for CBC’s Canada Reads. Carter’s stories and poems have been published widely in journals and longlisted multiple times for the CBC Literary Prizes. Her short story “Rhubarb” won the Prairie Fire Fiction Award and was subsequently included in Best Canadian Stories in 2015. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. An Ontarian transplanted to Manitoba, Carter lives just outside of Winnipeg, where she writes, teaches writing, and mentors other writers. She writes regularly about her creative process at www.laurencarter.ca.


Reviews

Praise for Lauren Carter

the questions of this novel are the questions of our timeThe Winnipeg Review

Lauren Carter doesnt waste any time drawing you into the complicated compelling and uncomfortably familiar lives of her characters From the first page youre immersed in the moving landscape of their existencePrairie Fire

The language is beautiful and emotionalPublishers Weekly


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Details

Dimensions:

312 Pages
8.5in * 5.5in *
1.00gr

Published:

September 09, 2025

Publisher:

Freehand Books

ISBN:

9781990601958

Book Subjects:

FICTION / Time Travel

Featured In:

All Books

Language:

eng

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