‘To stay out late, to remain awake and mobile from dusk till dawn, to walk the streets all night as Charles Dickens did during a bout of insomnia in 1860, is to enter an unfamiliar state of being and seeing,” notes Dan Richards in Overnight: Journeys, Conversations and Stories After Dark. An immersive blend of memoir and investigative journalism, the book finds the author unearthing the stories of shift workers and those who do essential labour while the rest of us sleep.
Richards, who reveals he is naturally more owl than lark, meets dock workers in Southampton; outreach workers at St Mungo’s providing support for the homeless; a search and rescue team in Lincolnshire; and night ferry operatives transporting sleeping passengers from Aberdeen to Lerwick in Shetland. In the early hours, he visits The Dusty Knuckle in Dalston, London, a bakery that trains young people with troubled backgrounds in the art of bread making. He also talks to the mothers of newborn babies negotiating night feeds through a fog of hormones and exhaustion.
Richards is our narrator, and his reading, like his book, is atmospheric and illuminating. His voice crackles with emotion as he recounts his behind-the-scenes experience of the nocturnal life of a hospital. In this instance, the author was not a dispassionate observer but a patient, admitted to Edinburgh Royal Infirmary with Covid in the early months of the pandemic. Richards’ eight-day hospitalisation was passed in a “semi-delirious trance”, frightened for himself and his loved ones and concentrating on “my one job: to breathe, to live”.
Available via WF Howes, 9hr 3min
Further listening
Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference
Rutger Bregman, Bloomsbury, 5hr 55min
The Dutch historian’s latest is an optimistic call for life’s achievers to put their talents to a higher calling: to make the world a better place, whether tackling the climate crisis or helping to avert the next pandemic. Narrated by Boris Hiestand.
Notes on a Drowning
Anna Sharpe, Orion, 9hr 40min
Hanako Footman reads this tense and fast-moving thriller in which a legal aid lawyer and a Home Office adviser investigate the death of a young women who drowned in the Thames in suspicious circumstances.