
In this moving autobiographical novel the narrator's mother Lucile raises her two daughters largely alone A former child model from a large Bohemian family Lucile is younger & more glamorous than the other mothers always in lipstick & stylishly dressed wayward & wonderful But as the years pass her occasional sadness gives way to overwhelming despair & delusion This is a story of luminous beauty & rambunctious joy of dark secrets & silences revelations & ultimately the unknowability of even those closest to us & in the face of the unknowable personal history becomes fiction Nothing Holds Back the Night is universally recognisable & singularly heartbreaking