The Other Side of Night

Name: The Other Side of Night
Author: Adam Hamdy

Adam Hamdy

Thriller

At a glance

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Genre bending

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Avoid spoilers!!!

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Page-turner alert

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Underrated gem

The lives of a disgraced police officer, a prolific author, and an upstanding citizen are inextricably bound together by a series of mysterious deaths.

For fans of Matt Haig and Anthony Horowitz, a “strange, compelling, and ultimately moving head-spinner of a novel” (John Connolly) in which the lives of a disgraced police officer, a prolific author, and an upstanding citizen are inextricably bound together by a series of mysterious deaths.

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The Other Side of Night begins with a man named David Asha writing about his biggest regret: his sudden separation from his son, Elliot. In his grief, David tells a story.

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Next, we step into the life of Harriet Kealty, a police officer trying to clear her name after a lapse of judgment. She discovers a curious inscription in a secondhand book—a plea: Help me, he’s trying to kill me. Who wrote this note? Who is “he”?

This note leads Harri to David Asha, who was last seen stepping off a cliff. Police suspect he couldn’t cope after his wife’s sudden death. Still, why would this man jump and leave behind his young son? Quickly, Harri’s attention zeroes in on a person she knows all too well.

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Ben Elmys: once the love of her life. A surrogate father to Elliot Asha and trusted friend to the Ashas.

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Ben may also be a murderer.

Don’t just take
our word for it

"An intriguing, fascinating, maddening tale from Adam Hamdy... If many thrillers suffer from a tendency to hurtle toward inevitable conclusions, this book is just the opposite—completely unpredictable."

- Sarah Lyall, New York Times

"Intelligently plotted and powerfully told, Hamdy’s deviously twisty tale of fate and coincidence, love and courage, and profoundly tough choices will shock, stir, and haunt readers long after the final page. Hamdy has upped his game with this one."

- Publishers Weekly (starred review) 🌟

"The Other Side of Night is like no crime novel I’ve ever read. The pages almost turn themselves and when I was finished I couldn’t stop thinking about the story’s incredible twists, turns, and surprises."

- James Patterson

What would you sacrifice for love?

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As I look back on my life, I’m haunted by the question. Perhaps what troubles me most is that I never got to choose. The pain I suffer, the loss I feel, the regret that clouds every single day—I never chose my sacrifice. Someone made the choice for me.

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Would I have taken a different path?

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I don’t know, but the opportunity would have been nice. Instead, like a character in a story, my fate was decided by someone else.

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My son.

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I think about Elliot every day. Sometimes in anger, often with remorse, mostly in pity, but always with love. You can draw your own conclusions about the morality of his actions. To this day, my own mind is not at peace with what happened.

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Is regret real?

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We feel it, but it doesn’t exist anywhere. I can’t point to it, any more than I can relive the events that caused it. But does that mean it isn’t real? I devoted many of my years to science, and after decades spent pondering the intersection between perception and reality, I’ve come to the conclusion that regret and all the other emotions we feel so deeply are just as real as the clothes we wear or the air we breathe. I’ve dissected my life, studied the great thinkers of every age, and considered all the theories of reality I could find, and I’ve come to accept one inescapable truth…