Simon Chance, Anglican bishop and former missionary, has withdrawn in mid-life to research his enduring mentor Dante, creator of The Divine Comedy. He is recently widowed, after the prolonged descent into dementia of his devoted wife Marigold. To recuperate from bereavement, he is invited by a life-long confidante, Clare, to join a house party of several friends from their university days in the hills behind St Tropez in southern France. The reunion coincides with the collapse of global banking confidence. On a walk in the forest of the Massif des Maures surrounding the villa, in search of a church abandoned centuries ago, Chance loses his way – in a ‘dark wood’, as once experienced by Dante – while the night turns wild. Marigold has not been the only love of Chance. The passionate liaison of his earlier life, pre-ordination, was with a student botanist. This very Evie, with her Parliamentarian spouse, is about to join the house party of Clare and a vital element in that intense, abandoned youthful liaison is yet to be reconciled with Chance’s ordained self. The working-through of the nature of love, physical and spiritual, in love’s innocence and purity, will redeem or destroy him. Or both.
A Dark and Stormy Night
Simon Chance, Anglican bishop and former missionary, has withdrawn in mid-life to research his enduring mentor Dante, creator of The Divine Comedy. On a walk in the forest of the Massif des Maures, in search of a church abandoned centuries ago, Chance loses his way – in a ‘dark wood’, as once experienced by Dante – while the night turns wild. In paperback and ePub.
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Additional information
| Dimensions | 23.4 × 15.6 cm |
|---|---|
| Publication | 5 June 2018 |
8 reviews for A Dark and Stormy Night
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A N Wilson –
This is a beautiful book. The Dante Scholar lost in a dark wood, the Bishop going into the darkness where God is. The man who has experienced Love on so many levels, reliving his past before confronting the great Empyrean. This impressive narration isn’t just a stream of consciousness. It is a well-crafted narration, it has a plot. Marigold is very vivid to me, but the other two women, Clare and Evie, are also very distinct. Tom Stacey also conveys – mysteriously – the characters of the other members of the house party: whom we never meet. Humour, humanity, passion are all here. It’s a superb achievement.
Andrew Roberts –
Tom Stacey again confronts life’s great issues in his superb new novel A Dark and Stormy Night. God and Mammon, music and Faith, pain and bereavement, the passing of time and the nature of friendship and grief, it opens with the hero getting physically lost in a forest in Provence at the time of the Great Crash. But is he spiritually lost too? All this plus Dante, pygmies and a brilliant twist in the tale. Vintage Stacey.
Eleanor Stern, The London Magazine –
Reading A Dark and Stormy Night is like having a conversation with an intelligent old friend— engaging, impossible to leave, at times infuriating, and always thought-provoking.
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Harry Mount, The Oldie –
A gripping novel, inspired by Dante.
Rowan Williams –
I was deeply engaged by the narrative … and its style of calm expansiveness.
A E Harvey DD –
A Dark and Stormy Night is a remarkable feat.I have no doubt that it makes a strong claim to be placed in the annals of literature.
Colin Blakely, The Church of England Newspaper –
Tom Stacey has had a remarkable life. And those years of experience are distilled in his new novel, A Dark and Stormy Night... He has produced a profound novel that explores the nature of faith in the modern world.
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Alexander Lucie-Smith, Roman Catholic priest, doctor of moral theology, and consulting editor of The Catholic Herald. –
Clearly, Dante is a favourite, but each reader will absorb the novel through the medium of his or her own reading. I picked up what I assumed were clear signals from T. S. Eliot, as well as spores from the Carmina Burana and of course, perhaps most clearly of all, the scriptures. But this does not really matter very much; you certainly do not need to be familiar with Dante to understand what goes on in Chance’s head; indeed, it may not even help much. All you need to be aware is that, as in the heads of us all, endless convoluted thoughts rush out when we are stressed. Words become tangled and dense, like the dark forest itself. Read more…