Lydia Fitzpatrick - Lights All Night Long

To Svetlana Alexievich for her brilliant and heartbreaking Secondhand Time ; to Ian Frazier for Travels in Siberia ; to Johann Hari for Chasing the Scream ; and to Donald Weber for the photographs in Interrogations , especially Vorkuta and April 26, 2008, Vorkuta, Russia , both of which I turned to time and time again for inspiration.

To Patricia, for being a “Bacca” to my girls every time I disappeared to reckon with this story.

Thank you to my families, the Fitzpatricks and the Davids, for your encouragement and enthusiasm. To Jan, for your endless faith in me. To my brother, whom I look up to even more than Ilya does Vladimir. And to my mother, for inspiring me every day, in every way. Thank you for all the books on tape we listened to, sitting in the car, in the driveway; and thank you for all of the adventures—especially the Russian ones.

To my grandfather, the first writer I knew, and to my father, who wanted to be a writer. I wish you could hold this book in your hands.

Thank you, with every bit of my love, to Margot and Win, who, in acknowledgment of themselves, have typed their names here. And to Grainger for all the moves, all those midwestern winters, for all the drafts you’ve read, and all the love you’ve given. How lucky I am to have you.

Lydia Fitzpatrick’s work has appeared in the The O. Henry Prize Stories , The Best American Mystery Stories , One Story , Glimmer Train , and elsewhere. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a fiction fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant. She graduated from Princeton University and received an MFA from the University of Michigan. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two daughters.

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Copyright © 2019 by Lydia Fitzpatrick

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Fitzpatrick, Lydia, 1982- author.

Title: Lights all night long : a novel / Lydia Fitzpatrick.

Description: New York : Penguin Press, 2019.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018034986 (print) | LCCN 2018038616 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525558743 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525558736 (hardcover) |

ISBN 9781984877901 (international edition)

Classification: LCC PS3606.I8874 (ebook) | LCC PS3606.I8874 L54 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018034986

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover design: Ben Denzer

Main cover image: RobShaw@BackFromLeave / Getty Images

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