Night Comes Down

Night Comes Down is set in a remote town in the borderlands between England and Wales in the early years of Queen Victoria’s reign.

Grace Matthews, the only child of the town’s learned doctor, loves the woods, the valleys, and the streams in her quiet corner of the world. She is a loner and spends as much of her life as she can outdoors-her desire to be in nature only curbed by her father’s unceasing wish to burden her with chores after the untimely death of her beloved mother.

Whenever she can get away, Grace watches in fascination and quiet horror as a branch line of the railway is built in the next valley over from hers. Before too long she finds the navvies’ camp and, against all her instincts, falls in love with a farm boy called Sean from County Sligo in Ireland who has his own story to tell.

Meanwhile, Grace’s father’s habitual taking of snuff leads him towards an ever greater mental and physical breakdown.

Author Biography

Richard Aronowitz grew up in rural Gloucestershire, and studied at Durham University, the Courtauld Institute, and at Oxford University. His writing has been published in The Guardian and The Independent newspapers in the U.K., as well in many leading literary journals, including The London Magazine and Stand. His poems have been shortlisted for theBridport Prizeand theTroubadour International Poetry Prize, and anthologised inAnvil New Poets 3. His debut poetry collectionLife Lessonscame out in 2019. Richard’s novels include Five Amber Beads (2006),It’s Just the Beating of My Heart (2010),An American Decade (2017)andNight Comes Down, which is due to be released in 2025. He lives in Oxford, UK.