Ring of Night
On sale
6th May 2027
Price: £22
Tina Chance knows what it takes to succeed: routine, determination, strategy. One of the most promising female boxers in the country, she’s the pride of her heat-and-rain-soaked Florida town, a place of peeling paint and half-empty bars. She couldn’t be more different from her sister Angela, who spends her nights drinking in a converted hearse with a group of miscreants.
Tina’s world collapses when Angela’s body is found mangled and stuffed into the wall of an abandoned house. Furious with the detectives’ lack of progress, she begins a clandestine investigation that takes her into the darkest corners of her town. There are leads – a car found abandoned in a swamp, an ambiguous voicemail – but no answers. That is until a stranger with a fake name and a secret past arrives in town and begins an ostensibly unrelated search of her own. But in Florida, nothing is as it seems. Though neither woman knows it, their destinies are already intertwined.
A hot-blooded and moving novel that turns as quickly and unpredictably as Florida weather, Ring of Night is a gripping exploration of the line between freedom and fate.
Tina’s world collapses when Angela’s body is found mangled and stuffed into the wall of an abandoned house. Furious with the detectives’ lack of progress, she begins a clandestine investigation that takes her into the darkest corners of her town. There are leads – a car found abandoned in a swamp, an ambiguous voicemail – but no answers. That is until a stranger with a fake name and a secret past arrives in town and begins an ostensibly unrelated search of her own. But in Florida, nothing is as it seems. Though neither woman knows it, their destinies are already intertwined.
A hot-blooded and moving novel that turns as quickly and unpredictably as Florida weather, Ring of Night is a gripping exploration of the line between freedom and fate.
Reviews
PRAISE FOR LAURA VAN DEN BERG
There's Borges and Bolaño, Kafka and Cortázar, Modiano and Murakami, and now Laura van den Berg . . . van den Berg has always been good, but with The Third Hotel she's become fantastic - in every sense of the word . . . The fantastic plot is elevated by van den Berg's fantastic writing and unique twists of language
A future cult classic . . . There's no denying [van den Berg's] skill at rendering this material; her sentences, at their best, are extraordinarily lucid, lodging places and people indelibly in memory
A beautiful and compelling read
I love Laura van den Berg for her eeriness and her elegance, the way the fabric of her stories is woven on a slightly warped loom so that you read her work always a bit perturbed. The Third Hotel is artfully fractured, slim and singular; it's a book that sings
A brilliant ghost story and a profoundly moving and atmospheric meditation on place, memory, and the very nature of reality, where everything is truly not as it seems
Ring of Night burns with the fever of its Florida setting - humid and searing, angry and beautiful. Laura van den Berg knows that brutality and humanity are not opposites, that heartbreak can breed both violence and resolve. Her Florida is feverish and feral, a place where the heat gets under your skin and the darkness has teeth. This novel is dangerous, devastating, and deeply alive - literary crime fiction at its very best
Whatever you want out of suspense, Ring of Night has it: richly drawn characters, high-stakes conflict, evocative atmosphere, a chilling mystery to be solved about the past colliding with a perilous predicament to be navigated in the future, all while immersed in the steamy noir underbelly of Florida
Ring of Night begins as a sister's quest to discover the truth about her sibling's death, and as such has the form and feel of a crime thriller. But along the way we are taken into a small town's luxuriant strangeness in the same way that David Lynch takes us into his white picket fence nightmares- a world of sinister flowers and plants, decaying old houses, waterways seething with hidden gators and a stifling atmosphere of dread which comes from everyone knowing everyone. Laura van den Berg's prose is restrained, exact and never exceeds what is needed to pull this story together