Nothing Holds Back the Night

Based on her childhood, Nothing Holds Back the Night is the moving and gripping new novel from Delphine de Vigan, author of the bestselling No and Me and the Goncourt Prize-shortlisted Underground Time.

Lucile, the narrator's mother, a former child model from a large Bohemian family, raises her two daughters largely alone. She is younger and more glamorous than the other mothers: always in lipstick and stylishly dressed, wayward and wonderful. But as the years pass her occasional sadness gives way to overwhelming despair and delusion. She becomes convinced she is telepathic, in control of the Paris metro system, with a special internet connection to the heart of Apple Inc., she numbers Marcello Mastroianni among her lovers, and argues with Jacques Lacan; she is hospitalised, medicated and then released in a kind of trance. Young Delphine grows up wondering: What changed her? Or did something shape her all along?

This is a story of luminous beauty and rambunctious joy, of dark secrets and silences, revelations and, ultimately, the unknowability of even those closest to us. And in the face of the unknowable, personal history becomes fiction; a life reconstructed using imagination, acute self-awareness, humour and marvellous sympathy. Nothing Holds Back the Night is universally recognisable and singularly heartbreaking.