Half The Day Is Night: A Novel - Softcover

McHugh, Maureen F

Softcover

ISBN 10: 185723863X ISBN 13: 9781857238631

Publisher: Orbit, 1999

Synopsis

French-Vietnamese David Dai, veteran of an African war in which he served as a mercenary, has taken a new assignment as bodyguard in Caribe, an underwater nation in the Caribbean. A stranger in a strange land, he enters into a volatile relationship with his new employer Mayla Ling, banker and heiress to an old-money fortune. But, as Mayla negotiates the biggest deal of her life, she attracts the attentions of La Mano di Dios, a revolutionary terrorist group, and David finds himself plunged back into the nightmare of his own violent past...

About this title

Review

Here's the second novel from an author whose first, the 1992 China Mountain Zhang, was widely acclaimed in sf circles. In contrast to the earlier book's world-spanning jaunts, this one offers a tight, tight focus on a claustrophobic setting--Caribe, a deep-sea habitat far beneath the Caribbean, where the sun doesn't reach and all the lighting is artificial. So is a great deal of habitat life, which is full of sharp details like the need to give yourself an artificial fever with "pyroxin" to maintain body warmth when scuba-fishing in the chill waters outside. McHugh's lead characters are both distrusted misfits who are at risk in this high-tech segment of the Third World: a male French-Vietnamese mercenary and the female Chinese-American banker who takes him on as a needed bodyguard. Tension steadily increases through financial shenanigans, terrorist intervention, scapegoat-hunting local police, sudden gunfire, and explosive sabotage. Ultimately, this seabed pressure-vessel called Caribe is a huge sealed trap for outsiders, who end up on the run, stripped of their exit visas, all the options closing down except the remote hope of making a break for it. The story squeezes harder and harder until the satisfyingly understated finale. Not a flashy novel, but a good one. --David Langford

Review

A nearly perfect work (WASHINGTON POST)

Maureen McHugh has lived up to the promise of CHINA MOUNTAIN ZHANG. What emerges is a kind of Graham Greene tropical adventure, a suspensful narrative of First Worlders trapped in a hostile non-Anglo society. Snazzy yet subtle. (ASIMOV'S)

HALF THE DAY IS NIGHT confirms McHugh's skill at immersing the reader (and her beleagured characters) in a future world so textured, multi-sensory, nuanced and flat-out convincing, both other novelistic places and real world travel seem meagre by comparison. (LOCUS)

nifty prose, with a highly convincing density of detail... On the final page you may find yourself quite surprised to be able to breathe again. Another good writer to watch out for. (SFX)

Edition details

• Publisher: Orbit
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 185723863X
• ISBN 13: 9781857238631
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 352