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E-book: Opening Night

  • Format: EPUB+DRM
  • Pub. Date: 02-Jul-2026
  • Publisher: Granta Books
  • Language: eng
  • ISBN-13: 9781803513409
  • Format - EPUB+DRM
  • Price: 19,88 €*
  • * the price is final i.e. no additional discount will apply
  • This ebook in not yet published. You can order it after: 02-Jul-2026
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  • This ebook is for personal use only. E-Books are non-refundable.
  • Format: EPUB+DRM
  • Pub. Date: 02-Jul-2026
  • Publisher: Granta Books
  • Language: eng
  • ISBN-13: 9781803513409

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'I met Mollie's paintings before I met Mollie.'

Shortly after the imposed isolation of the pandemic, Sara Baume came across a painting at a pop-up exhibition in a renovated shed in rural West Cork. It so intrigued her that she was inspired to make contact with the artist. Mollie Douthit, a North Dakotan exile, was living and working alone in a log cabin down a ravaged laneway surrounded by rugged coastline. Sara and Mollie discovered they had much in common - a dysfunctional attitude towards companionship, a devotion to the daily rituals of their respective art practices, an affinity with nature. They started to meet every month for soup and punishing swims in the Atlantic.

Sara fell under the spell of Mollie's paintings, pictures that welded memory and reality, and gradually started to write about them, curious as to whether any particular insight might be provided by the intimacy of friendship with the artist, and whether it might be possible to craft a book in the style of the paintings. But what she had not anticipated was that a settled period in her own life would coincide with a period of tumultuous change for Mollie, and soon she found herself squabbling with more complex ideas, about community and nationality, about neurosis and mysticism, about love and pain and the power of art.

Reviews

Baume is a writer of outstanding grace and style. She writes beyond the time we live in -- Colum McCann A wonderful writer -- Max Porter Baume's writing is near faultless: instinctively balanced, precise and often surprising -- Melissa Harrison A writer touched by greatness -- Joseph O'Connor Sara Baume has as much in common with, say, Maggie Nelson as she does with Edna O'Brien * Times Literary Supplement * Sara Baume is a writer's writer, able to clothe her insights on life, art and human connection in beautifully evocative language. There are few living writers who can artistically convey compassion in a single sentence. Sara has given us all the gift of friendship with this book, but most importantly, has allowed us the privilege of getting to know Mollie through the creative lens of an unreliable memory -- Derek Owusu Opening Night is such a beautifully and carefully observed book. I felt like I was in conversation with Baume's thoughts the entire time I was reading it. This book made me think deeply about my own friendships, my creative practice and the place I've come to call home and, for this, I am profoundly grateful. No one knows their way round a quietly profound sentence quite like Sara Baume does -- Jan Carson Sara Baume's Opening Night is a unique and moving portrait of a friendship between an artist and a writer. It's so intimate and honest I felt bereft when I finished it. In her compelling, concise prose, Baume evokes what it means to devote your daily life to conjuring something new and true - and how complex and demanding an activity that is. I've never read anything like it -- Jennifer Higgie In this beautifully written and resonating book, Sara Baume has created an archive via the frame of friendship. Opening Night captures the mystery, infatuation, fantasy, and doubling that occurs in artmaking and between new friends. It is an impressive and generous work, chronicling the pandemic years with fine detail, questions, observations. I had the feeling, while reading, that I was encountering something completely of our time, something that will be read in the future -- Lauren Aimee Curtis

More info

A wholly original narrative, full of beauty and wisdom, about the nature of friendship and art, from an award-winning Irish author.
Sara Baume is the author of the novels Spill Simmer Falter Wither, A Line Made by Walking and Seven Steeples, and the non-fiction work handiwork. She has won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award, the Rooney Prize, the Hennessy New Irish Writing Award and an Irish Book Award, and has been shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Folio Prize and nominated for many more. In 2023 she was named as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. She lives in West Cork, Ireland.