NIGHT FOR DAY

Set primarily in America during the McCarthy era during the making of a film, the book looks at deception, hiding in plain sight, denying who you are, creating a mask within the film industry. The title of the book Night for Day is common parlance in film language to shoot scenes in the day and light them to give the illusion that they are taking place at night. Desmond Frank, an elderly American ex-pat living in Italy, is reflecting on the life he gave up more than half a century ago. Back then he was a successful Hollywood screenwriter, working on a major studio script for a gritty piece of underworld noir and conducting a secret relationship with the film's leading man. But when Desmond's friend and collaborator leftist director John Marsh learned that his wife was about to expose them both to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the two men were chaotically thrown into making impossible choices - between complicity or defiance, the compulsion to live a lie, or the freedom to leave everything behind. Set in Los Angeles 1950 over the course of a single day while the two friends grapple with the escalating Communist witch-hunt in Hollywood. Beautifully written, expansive in scope, tenderly intimate writing from the American writer who is Professor of Creative Writing at Queen Mary University of London. 661pp in sturdy softback.