Author Event: Brian Duren Presents Day Brings Back the Night

Overview

Day Brings Back the Night narrates a family story in the first person from the points of view of five characters as it explores the effects of intergenerational trauma and the power of intergenerational love. The novel begins in St. Paul, in 1989, with Part I, narrated from the point of view of Helen, a wife and mother, sorting through her papers and photographs, preparing for the move she and her family will make to their new home. The sorting brings back memories, and Helen relives her life, the emotional abuse and trauma she experienced, and her relationship with her husband, Tom, whose love saved her. In Part II, set in 2006 and narrated from Tom’s point of view, his daughter, Amanda, traps him in his car during their drive from St. Paul to a cabin in the Boundary Waters, so she can confront him with the questions that haunt her about her mother’s disappearance fifteen years earlier. Part III, set in that cabin in 2023, is narrated from the points of view of Tom, his second wife, Grace, Amanda, and her brother, Nicholas. Plagued by a past that has fractured them, the family struggles to understand, forgive, and remain a family. But can they?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Brian Duren was born and raised in Minnesota. He earned a Doctorate in French literature from the University of Paris, as well as a B.A. in English and a Ph.D. in French from the University of Minnesota, and taught modern French literature and European cinema at the Universities of Texas, Tulsa, Iowa, and Minnesota. He eventually left teaching and became an administrator.

After retiring from academe, Brian launched a new career as an author of literary fiction. He writes novels with an introspective quality about nomadic characters who travel through time and space, always returning to what haunts them. His first novel, Whiteout, praised by the St. Paul Pioneer Press as a “stunning debut novel, worthy of national recognition,” won the Independent Publisher Gold Medal for Midwestern Fiction. Peter Geye lauded Brian’s second book, Ivory Black, as “a novel of profound elegance,” while Junot Diaz described his third, The Gravity of Love, as “a magnificent haunting duet of grief, absence, and the unshakable bonds of family …” Day Brings Back the Night is Brian's fourth novel.