Reviewed by Kritika Narula
Talking at Night
by Claire Daverley
Penguin Random House (Michael Joseph)
June 2023, 400 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0241604830
“There is only what happens, he tells her. What is and what isn’t.”
Rosie Winters and Will White couldn’t find less common ground if they tried. At 17, Rosie is the Grade-A rule-follower and meticulous planner, already set on her path to university when she first meets Will. Her twin brother, Josh, too, finds an unexpected camaraderie with Will, who starts tutoring him in maths.
Will, however, is the antithesis of their world of order and etiquette. A walking template of a bad boy, his reputation at school precedes him, fueled by his rap sheet of scandalous entanglements, an absentee mother, and a glaring indifference to academic ambition. The clincher? He has no intention of going to university.
Rosie is hesitant to let herself be swept up into Will’s orbit, even though their pull seems mutual. Will tells her he can wait, and despite her readiness to pursue him over her mother’s disapproval, she finds herself choosing her brother Josh over a potential entanglement with Will. Soon, an accident changes their lives — and also ties them together in the cruellest way, leaving them both reeling in a spiral of shame, self-blame, grief, and a torrent of other emotions. Over the next few years and decades, they find each other, only they choose the most torturous paths to arrive at their doorsteps.
In contemporary literary fiction, the premise of long-distance friendships that begin in school or college and stretch across decades is a familiar yet fertile ground. It recalls the emotional architecture of Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley, the quiet intensity of Normal People by Sally Rooney, and the bittersweet arc of One Day by David Nicholls. While literary fiction treats these stories with introspection and emotional nuance, the romance genre often gives them a more hopeful spin — think People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry or Where Rainbows End by Cecelia Ahern, where time and distance act less as tragic barriers and more as narrative seasoning.
This book was about Will and Rosie learning to be complete as individuals before they could show up for each other in the way that they wanted to. It is a contemplation on what happens when grief so rudely disrupts your journey of self-discovery and leaves you behind your peers and your goalposts and your milestones.
If you’re a known righteous person, the living template of a good girl, the caricature of a fit-into-the-ideal, you’ll make many choices in life to your own detriment. More specifically, to the detriment of your own happiness. You’ll justify those choices with claims of selflessness. You’ll intellectualise your suffering as a byproduct of virtue — a noble cost, a tax for being good. You’ll argue about the deservedness of happiness. All you’ll learn is that the line between being a pathological doormat and an alive human is paper-thin.
And that’s the tragedy of righteousness, isn’t it? That it convinces you there is a right thing to do and a wrong thing to do, a clean moral line to walk. Righteous people live by a code — not one enforced by law or religion, but something deeply internal, often inherited, intellectualised, and rehearsed. To them, emotional chaos is not a justification for unkindness, and intense feeling is never an excuse to make the wrong choice. They choose what is “right,” even when it costs them everything.
A righteous person does the right thing. That’s the simple math they understand and live by.
But the painful paradox is this: in trying so hard not to hurt others, you end up hurting yourself. And the very people who love you the most. The ones who choose you, again and again, without conditions. They suffer not because of your cruelty, but because of your restraint. Because they love you unequivocally, they feel compelled to support your righteousness, even when it goes against their own joy. And that becomes their punishment — for loving you too much, too purely. And it mirrors your own.
So after all the overthinking, the weighing of moral scales, the self-denial, the martyrdom, you’re not free. You’re not good. You’re not even okay. You are exhausted, depleted, joyless. You’ve sacrificed love at the altar of principle, and the result isn’t fulfilment; it’s desolation. It is perversely tragic, not just ironic, that in doing what you thought was right, you end up losing the very thing you were trying to protect.
The kindest thing someone who loves you will do for you is to free you from these shackles, this idea of right and wrong, and the burden of choosing that comes with it.
And Will does that for Rosie. This book isn’t about romantic love at all in that sense; it’s about kindness and its ability to shatter all ceilings and roofs and standards — those relentless standards you uphold yourselves to — and of selfless devotion to the idea of people as people, grieving, faulty messes of humans, making the wrong choices despite it all. To be seen in your attempts, rather than in your results.
“I know it seems like I didn’t choose you, ever, Rosie says, when all I wanted was to choose you.” Will and Rosie’s commitment is honest, low-key, and earned. The frustrations of two fallible people trying to do it right make Talking At Night a worthwhile read, A fragile, fierce meditation on love, restraint, and what it means to be chosen, seen, and loved selflessly.
About the reviewer: Kritika Narula is a writer, journalist, and content marketer from Delhi, India. She holds a master’s in Media Management from the University of Glasgow and runs a little content agency, KN Content. Her writing has appeared in The Hooghly Review, Usawa Literary Review, Lobster Salad and Champagne Magazine, The AuVert Magazine, Sanity by Tanmoy, among others. You can find her kritika.narula on Instagram and Threads/a>, onBlueSky, on Twitter, and on her website or her newsletter, Kritikal Reading.