Hold Back The Night by Jessica Moor BLOG TOUR #HoldBackTheNight @jessicammoor @ZaffreBooks @Tr4cyF3nt0n #BookReview

 

March 2020. Annie is alone in her house as the world shuts down, only the ghosts of her memories for company. But then she receives a phone call which plunges her deeper into the past.

1959. Annie and Rita are student nurses at Fairlie Hall mental hospital. Working long, gruelling hours, they soon learn that the only way to appease their terrifying matron is to follow the rules unthinkingly. But what is happening in the hospital's hidden side wards? And at what point does following the rules turn into complicity - and betrayal?

1983. Annie is reeling from the loss of her husband and struggling to face raising her daughter alone. Following a chance encounter, she offers a sick young man a bed for the night, a good deed that soon leads to another. Before long, she finds herself entering a new life of service - her home a haven for those who are cruelly shunned. But can we ever really atone?

Hold Back The Night by Jessica Moor is published in hardback on 9 May 2024 by Manilla Press. My thanks to the publisher who sent my copy for review as part of this Compulsive Readers Blog Tour 

Hold Back The Night is a short novel that delivers so much, it is beautifully formed, filled with colourful and exquisitely created characters who will tear at your heart. The author deals with some of the darkest, most troublesome issues in our recent history. She does it with style and compassion, and creates so many questions to ask, with debates to be had. It is the perfect book for discussion. 

This is Annie's life story, told in three eras.  Whilst the novel begins in 2020 at the start of the Covid pandemic when Annie is in her later years, it is the earlier times that really shape the woman that Annie will be. 

In the late 1950s Annie and her friend Rita are student nurses at Fairlie Hall mental hospital. Annie always knew that she wanted to make people feel better, but her hatred of blood meant that general nursing was not for her. Fairlie with its community of patients suffering from a variety of mental disorders will suit her. However, it isn't really how she'd imagined it to be. Their Matron is a stern, cold woman and Annie and Rita soon realise that they must do exactly as they are ordered.

In the mid 1980s Annie is recently widowed. She and her teenage daughter have used the money received after her husband's industrial accident to buy a bigger house. When Annie meets Robbie and Jim on the street near a nightclub, she realises that Robbie is seriously ill. His landlady has evicted her and it seems the right thing for Annie to offer him a bed, after all, she could do with the cash, a lodger will be no trouble at all. 

Jessica Moor explores the issues around conversion therapy, carried out at Fairlie Hall in the guise as a treatment for the patient's mental illness. Homosexuality was still illegal in those days, and these treatments were both horrifying and undignified, for the patients and for Annie and Rita.  In the 1980s, the AIDS epidemic was just beginning, along with the illogical thinking of most medics; the hysteria created by the media; the lack of information, the wealth of misinformation, yet Annie continues to take in these pitiful men who have nowhere else to go. 

In 2020 we find the beginning of the Covid era, again the bombardment of misinformation, the terror spread by the media and the division of communities rears its ugly head. 

Annie is a complex character. She's not the stereotypical nursing sort, at times it feels as though she does things, sometimes extraordinary things, without really thinking about why. She has an innermost feeling that she must do it, she must help, but she does it in a quiet way, sometimes worrying about herself and her daughter, often not really knowing if what she is doing is right. 

The biggest beauty of this novel are the friendships created. Whilst Annie and Rita are not always close throughout the years, it is Rita's death that creates Annie's most vivid memories, and it is joyful to read. Her relationship with Jim; Robbie's partner, and Paul, Rita's widower are so strong and have formed Annie so much. 

This is a novel to savour. The issues raised add such a depth to the story and are both moving and anger inducing at the same time. Highly recommended. 

Jessica Moor studied English at Cambridge before completing a Creative Writing MA at
Manchester University. 

Moor was selected as one of the Observer's debut novelists of 2020, and her first novel, Keeper was chosen by the Sunday Times, Independent and Cosmopolitan as one of their top debuts of the year. 

Keeper was nominated for the Desmond Elliott Prize and an Edgar Award. 

Young Women is her second novel.

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