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The Night Sky: A Novel

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The Night Sky: A Novel

Paperback

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Paperback
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Overview

The Night Sky is a moving novel about the solitary moral courage of a women raising a child alone and the complex resilience of family. Ivy Slovak is a jewelry designer and artist whose days are absorbed by the struggle to make an unreliable paycheck cover the needs of her infant son. Hungry for the freedom of the world outside her window, Ivy is haunted by the memory of her mother, who abandoned her when she was seven years old. She recalls the years spent with her loving but itinerant father, wandering the desert, hoping somehow to find the troubled, beautiful woman who had left them both. With quiet eloquence and deep compassion, The Night Sky establishes Morris as one of contemporary American literature's foremost chroniclers of the secrets and strengths of the human spirit.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312156091
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	05/15/1997
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.68(d)

About the Author

Mary Morris is the author of the novels House Arrest, Crossroads, and The Waiting Room; two travel memoirs, Nothing to Declare and Wall to Wall; and the award-winning story collections Vanishing Animals and Other Stories and The Bus of Dreams. Her most recent story collection is The Lifeguard. She teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

What People are Saying About This

Stuart Dybek

Mary Morris inhabits Ivy with an intensity and clarity of vision that makes this a story at once sad, tough, and honest, but at the same time hauntingly beautiful.

Reading Group Guide

In The Night Sky, Mary Morris tells the story of Ivy Slovak, a single mother struggling to provide for her infant son while coping with childhood memories of abandonment by her own mother. While Ivy's story invokes memories from the past and struggles of the present, the night sky holds within it dreams yet to be realized. With quiet eloquence and deep compassion, The Night Sky establishes Mary Morris as one of the foremost chroniclers of the secrets and strengths of the human spirit.

Discussion Questions:
1. In manuscript, this book was originally called The Night Sky, but Morris's publisher felt she should change the title, so it was published first as A Mother's Love. At some risk Morris wanted Picador to republish this book with the original title. Why do you think Morris felt so strongly about this? Why is The Night Sky the real title of this book?

2. Why do we need the story in the past to inform the present?

3. How is Ivy's art reflected in the structure of the novel as a whole?

4. Ivy is named Ivy because her mother says she likes to cling. How and to what does she cling? Is her name a self-fulfilling prophecy?

5. In some ways this novel is a book about gambling. What is the role of gambling in the novel?

6. Sense of place is always important for Morris who is also a travel writer. What part does the desert play in this book?

7. Is Ivy a good mother? How is it in the end that we know what kind of mother she is or will be?

Mary Morris, in her own words:
"I came to domesticity backward," Morris explains. "First I had a child, then I had a husband." Morris was not married when her daughter Katie was born in 1987. In 1988, she met Canadian journalist Larry O'Conner at a conference in Virginia. After surviving the difficulties of a long-distance relationship, the two married in August 1989, spent a year traveling around the Southwest, and finally settled in Brooklyn, New York.

"I feel ill at ease with the notion of who I am. There are really three parts: who I am as a person, who I am as a writer, and then there are characters in my books. I think my fiction and nonfiction get blurred together in readers' minds. It may be that the parts people think are the most autobiographical are the least so, and the parts they think are the least [true] may -- on another, disguised level -- be the most faithful."
-- Publishers Weekly

About the Author
Mary Morris is also the author of the novels House Arrest, (available from Picador USA), Crossroads, and The Waiting Room; two travel memoirs, Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Women Traveling Alone and Wall to Wall: From Beijing to Berlin by Rail; and the award-winning story collections Vanishing Animals and Other Stories and The Bus of Dreams.Her new story collection is The Lifeguard. Mary Morris teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and daughter.

From the B&N Reads Blog

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Editorial Reviews

Marvelous, spiritually charged fiction, an example of the contemporary American novel at its best.” —Christopher Tilghman, The Los Angeles Times Book Review

“A haunting tale . . . Ivy Slovak's life is not one a reader will soon forget.” —Roxanna Robinson, The New York Times Book Review

“Morris's novel joins a rich literary tradition of women who, in the absence of mothers, flounder in their search for womanhood, who are fused to phantoms they fear they will never shake off.” —Barbara Lazear Ascher, The Washington Post Book World

“A quiet celebration of motherhood—and fatherhood, too. Told in eloquent, vivid snatches, it's a fast-paced yet deeply moral story that stimulates and satisfies the mind, emotions, and imagination.” —Jean Patterson, Orlando Sentinel

“A mother's coming of age novel...Morris is too accomplished to write a surface account . . . [She] goes deeper to explore love and loss and coming to terms with one's past.” —Philadelphia Inquirer

“One gutsy woman and one fantastic writer.” —Louise Bernikow, Cosmopoliltan

“Morris here creates a sensitive, intriguing, and touching portrait of a single mother struggling with eternal issues that are given a timely twist.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Morris inhabits Ivy with an intensity and clarity of vision that makes this a story at once tough, sad, and honest, yet at the same time hauntingly beautiful.” —Stuart Dybek

“Morris delves into the ordeal of motherhood and penetrates its mysteries. On view here is the mastery of a writer in her prime, revealed in the palpable restraint of the writing and the hypnotic tempo of a commanding story.” —Booklist

“Morris perfectly captures the strains of solo child rearing. And she celebrates the ability of a woman to navigate without a mate, creating alternative forms of solace and power.” —New Woman

“Morris's novel joins a rich literary tradition of women who, in the absence of mothers, flounder in their search for womanhood, who are fused to phantoms they fear they will never shake off.” —Barbara Lazear Ascher, The Washington Post Book World

From the Publisher

A haunting tale…Ivy Slovak's life is not one a reader will soon forget.
—Roxana Robinson, The New York Times Book Review

Roxana Robinson

Morris's novel joins a rich literary tradition of women who, in the absence of mothers, flounder in their search for womanhood, who are fused to phantoms they fear they will never shake off.
—Barbara Lazear Ascher, The Washington Post Book World

Barbara Lazear Ascher

Marvelous, spiritually charged fiction, an example of the contemporary American novel at its best.
—(Christopher Tilghman, Los Angeles Times Book Review)

Christopher Tilghman