All Other Nights

Name: All Other Nights
ISBN: 9780393338324

A Novel

Dara Horn

How is tonight different from all other nights? For Jacob Rappaport, a Jewish soldier in the Union army during the Civil War, it is a question his commanders have already answered for him—on Passover, 1862, he is ordered to murder his own uncle in New Orleans, who is plotting to assassinate President Lincoln. After this harrowing mission, Jacob is recruited to pursue another enemy agent, the daughter of a Virginia family friend. But this time, his assignment isn't to murder the spy, but to marry her. Their marriage, with its riveting and horrifying consequences, reveals the deep divisions that still haunt American life today.

Based on real personalities such as Judah Benjamin, the Confederacy's Jewish secretary of state and spymaster, and on historical facts and events ranging from an African American spy network to the dramatic self-destruction of the city of Richmond, All Other Nights is a gripping and suspenseful story of men and women driven to the extreme limits of loyalty and betrayal. It is also a brilliant parable of the rift in America that lingers a century and a half later: between those who value family and tradition first, and those dedicated, at any cost, to social and racial justice for all.

In this eagerly awaited third novel, award-winning author Dara Horn brings us page-turning storytelling at its best. Layered with meaning, All Other Nights reinvents the most American of subjects with originality and insight.

About the Author

Dara Horn is an acclaimed American novelist and scholar whose fiction explores Jewish history, memory, and the stories people inherit and reinvent. She holds a PhD in Hebrew and Yiddish literature from Harvard University and has taught Jewish literature and Israeli culture at Harvard and Sarah Lawrence College.

Her debut novel, In the Image (2002), was followed by The World to Come (2006), All Other Nights (2009), A Guide for the Perplexed (2013), and Eternal Life (2018). Her novels range from a Chagall-inspired mystery involving a stolen painting, to the story of a Jewish Union spy during the Civil War, to an immortal woman who has lived through millennia of Jewish history. Her work often draws on rabbinic tradition, lost Jewish texts, and the long arc of Jewish survival.

Horn has received the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction, the Harold U. Ribalow Prize, and the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. Granta named her one of the Best Young American Novelists. Her nonfiction book People Love Dead Jews (2021), a collection of essays on how the world engages with Jewish history and antisemitism, was a bestseller. Her essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Smithsonian. She lives in New Jersey with her family.