A taut and uncanny thriller about one girl’s search for home, melding time travel, magic realism, horror, and literary suspense.

One forty-below December night, 19-year-old Ash Hayes finds herself locked out of her family home in rural Minnesota. She seeks shelter from the freezing cold and certain death at the closest house on the road, with neighbours she hasn’t yet met.

The next morning, everything is off-kilter – the neighbours’ house has no mirrors or modern technology, and all the windows blocked. When Ash tries to call her parents, their numbers are disconnected. One of the strange inhabitants there is a doctor, who offers Ash a terrible form of help and won’t take no for an answer. In her efforts to get out of the house and back to her regular life, though, Ash finds herself transported to an even stranger place and time, setting off a chain of events that connect with (and alter) her past and her future.

For fans of Mona Awad and Emily St. John Mandel, The Longest Night is a high-stakes, genre-twisting story about searching for something stable in a world where reality is ever-changing and can’t be trusted.

Lauren Carter is the author of four books including the novels This Has Nothing to Do With You and Swarm and the poetry collections Following Sea and Lichen Bright. Her first novel, Swarm, was on CBC's list of 40 novels that could change Canada. In 2014, her short story "Rhubarb" won top place in the Prairie Fire fiction prize and appeared in the annual Best Canadian Stories (edited by John Metcalf). Her work has also been nominated for the Journey Prize and longlisted multiple times for the CBC Literary Prizes in both poetry and fiction while also earning multiple grants, including the Manitoba Arts Council Major Arts Award, given to Manitoba artists whose creative work shows "exceptional quality and accomplishment." She grew up in Blind River, ON, and has lived in the Greater Toronto Area and The Pas, MB. She currently resides in St. Andrews, MB.

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Praise for Lauren Carter

“… the questions of this novel are the questions of our time.” — The Winnipeg Review

“Lauren Carter doesn’t waste any time drawing you into the complicated, compelling and uncomfortably familiar lives of her characters. From the first page, you’re immersed in the moving landscape of their existence …” — Prairie Fire

“The language is beautiful and emotional …” — Publishers Weekly