Night Film

When Cordova’s beautiful daughter is found dead in a warehouse, McGrath can’t help but pick up the trail. His pacy narrative voice is interrupted by magazine interviews, text messages, Facebook pages; a Cordova fan forum even pops up on the printed page . . . The result is multiple narratives that read like real life (or a more exciting version of it) . . . Night Film doesn’t cease to be with its last full stop. [Pessl] has developed a phone app and a website with extra material – a savvy move.

Vogue

The real and the imaginary, life and art, are dizzyingly distorted not only in a Cordova night film – which a fictional Time article calls "a spellbinding and emotionally harrowing experience" – but in Pessl’s own Night Film as well. McGrath’s prologue opens with a dictum "Everyone has a Cordova story, whether they like it or not." This book is ours.

Vanity Fair

This month’s smartest (and creepiest) new novel is a hell of a read . . . An intensely writerly project that doesn’t jettison the reader . . . It explores how stories seep from texts into the world; not only in that it follows a journalist investigating a cult horror-film director whose life is entangled in his fictions, but also because the pages are peppered with fake news article and websites. A narrative signifying narratives, this novel echoes . . . The action bullet-trains through an artfully plotted world of secret screenings and suspicious deaths.

GQ (Book of the Month)

Night Film is like a head-long fall into a dangerous film set, with the kind of eeriness that makes you jump at your own shadow.

Marie Claire

Using mixed media, Pessl tell the tale of an eccentric, Kubrick-like film director and the mysterious deaths that litter his past.

Grazia

Deliciously spine-tingling... all-consuming and mind-altering. Nothing else matters while there are pages to turn and, once the book is over, the world seems an emptier place.

Daily Telegraph

Night Film, the gorgeously written, spellbinding new novel by the dazzlingly inventive Marisha Pessl, will hold you in suspense until you turn the final page.

Stylist

Night Film is rich with arcane detail that ranges from obscure Hollywood history to the uses of occult herbs. It is also cleverly illustrated with plausible-looking articles about Cordova and his associates from Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone and Wikipedia… this sprawling, generous, high-octane book remains as entertaining as a late night showing of a horror classic.

Sunday Times

Intensely gripping . . . an entertaining read in the same league as Gone Girl

The Times

This summer’s GONE GIRL: a completely absorbing literary thriller.

Library Journal

This magnificently layered and suspenseful literary thriller by the author of Special Topics in Calamity Physics reads as though written by the fairy offspring of Siri Hustvedt and Paul Auster. You'll want to devote an entire weekend to losing yourself in the search for Cordova.

Cathy Rentzenbrink, Bookseller, Book of the Month

Beautifully imagined, beautifully written, and hypnotically suspenseful.

Lee Child, author of A WANTED MAN

A testament to Marisha Pessl’s tremendous gifts as a storyteller.

Scott Smith, author of THE RUINS

A literary mystery that’s also a page-turner . . . Night Film might be the most talked-about novel this summer.

Time Out New York