Hold Back the Night by Jessica Moor

I read Hold Back the Night in June when I hosted a buddy read. I say hosted, but what I mean is I suggested a schedule, totally ignored it and flew through the book because it was too good not to!

Set over three interweaving periods of time, our central protagonist, Annie, ponders on her life. Hold Back the Night is a powerful, emotive novel that is equally heartbreaking and tenderly hopeful.

Annie lives alone and is in her 80s, and she spends her days reflecting on her past - moments of joy, sorrow and regret aplenty.

She and fellow nurse Rita began working at Fairlie Hall Mental Hospital in 1959, and though they were shocked by the morally questionable practices undertaken, they never spoke out.

Fast forward to 1983, following the death of her husband, and Rita, in a moment of sheer spontaneity, opens her home to young men with AIDS. Is this somewhat of a personal atonement? Or purely to offer her nursing knowledge to those who are shunned and refused care elsewhere.

However, in 2020, during the COVID pandemic, thoughts of her fragility hit hard, and the past must be confronted, however uncomfortable.

Hold Back the Night covers some difficult, often disturbing content, and here we get a stark reminder of the prejudices of the 1980s. It's all sensitively handled and very well written. 4.5⭐️

Thank you to the publisher for kindly sending me an advance copy in return for an honest review.

A heart wrenching story about a nurse working through the AIDS pandemic. These stories are always a tough but necessary read and the writing here was excellent. As expected, because I also was very impressed by Moor's debut release.

This is a beautiful, moving novel following Annie throughout her life in three specific timelines: first we meet her in 1959 when she moves in with Ruth as they're starting out as psychiatric nurses; in 1983 where Annie take in a boarder who is ill with AIDS; and in 2020 where she's living alone through the Covid lockdown. This is a novel that explores the attitudes to gay men, and to the nature of epidemics and how this intersected in history. I loved getting to know Annie and seeing how her eyes were opened to what was happening in the hospital she worked in. Her attitude towards the AIDS epidemic made me love her as she took in dying men and treated them with such care when society was turning away from them. She is such a strong women and stands her ground but she has her thoughts and emotions that she keeps quite contained within. This is one of those novels that really got to me and I keep finding myself thinking about it. I highly recommend it!

A thoughtful, gripping story. Loved the three different timelines and how each help the reader to piece the story together. Highly recommended.

I’m still reeling from this book, and I read it about a month ago.

Hold Back the Night is set in 3 timelines:
1959, Annie and Ruth are training to be psychiatric nurses in an institution that believes they’re at the forefront of treatment. They learn to speed-shave and dress male patients, hold down women receiving ECT, and take part in conversion therapy for some male patients. “Conversion therapy” sounds pretty harmless, doesn’t it? In reality it wasn’t.

1983, Annie is widowed and bringing up her daughter, Rosie, alone. She meets a young man who is ill, and his friend. She learns that he has been evicted because he has HIV. Annie offers them a home and nursing care. Soon her home becomes a haven for infected, homeless, shunned boys. I think in the back of her mind, she knows she’s trying to make amends for her part in the conversion therapies she took part in.

Which brings us to the third timeline in 2020, and Covid.
There are some parallels to be drawn (uncertainty, fear), but this timeline wraps everything up together, and Annie faces up to her part in 1959.

I loved this book, and the way the timelines wove together really helped me to understand Annie and her reasons for doing just what she did - rightly or wrongly.

Definitely one of my books of the year.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC.

I think this book does an interesting job of contextualising homophobia and the AIDS pandemic from the British perspective. It's a sort of bystander narrative which therefore means we don't get the complete picture from the victims themselves, but a filtered view through the viewpoint of someone 'just following orders'. The jumping around of time periods was sometimes a little jarring - it might have been nice to have spent a little bit longer in each before jumping back to the next - but effectively split the narrative. While it didn't completely draw me in, it's a solid book and definitely prompts thought.

An interesting book telling the story of Annie at three different points in her life: when she begins work as a student nurse in 1959, when she takes in and cares for men dying from AIDS in the 1980s and when she is at home alone during the pandemic in 2020. The subject matter is difficult - exploring the treatment of gay men and the impact of AIDS - but it is well-researched and interesting to learn more about the history of these times. I liked the way the three strands of the story were ultimately woven together,

The story follows Annie at three significant points in her life: 1959, when she and fellow nurse, Rita, begin working at Fairlie Hall Mental Hospital; 1983, following the death of her husband, when she opens her home to young men with AIDS who are being refused care elsewhere and 2020, during the COVID pandemic.

Everything about the book and its characters is beautiful. The kindness and compassion that the characters show each other is such a stark contrast to the three very different but equally challenging time periods in which the book is set. I liked how the author didn't shy away from addressing some shameful practices and attitudes from the past. This wasn't easy to read but I don't think it should be, if we are to really understand why certain things must never be repeated.

If I have any criticism of the book at all, it's that I did find it difficult to keep track of all the different characters. I was pleased to be reading a digital copy as it meant I could search the text to check I knew who was who.

I really enjoyed this book. It’s the story of Annie and Rita who are both nurses in a psychiatric hospital in the late fifties. Here we witness some practices that are quite upsetting but definitely happened in this time . Patients being subject to conversion therapy as well as other barbaric practices. We then follow Annie in the eighties when AIDS was at its highest, she opens her house to the sick because they were so ostracised in the public domain. Lastly it’s 2020 and covid is everywhere and she is isolating and reminiscing about the past . It’s such a good story showing prejudices and there’s a lot to discuss . I loved the characters especially Annie and how she tried to do the right thing. I think this would be a good book club choice , so much to think about and learn from.

I enjoyed the author’s previous novel Young Women and was looking forward to reading Hold Back the Night.
It’s set over three timelines; during the pandemic in 2020, in 1959 when Annie is a student nurse and in 1983. In 2020 Annie looks back over her life as a nurse and as a widow and single mother in the 1980s when she provided support for young men dying of AIDS.
This is a moving and emotional novel and a stark reminder of the prejudices in the 1980s. It is written sparingly and moves between the timelines with ease, bringing to life each time period and Annie’s life at the time.
A beautiful and moving novel.
Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this digital ARC.

I loved both of Moor’s previous books, Keeper and Young Women, so it is seriously high praise to say that, for me, Hold Back the Night is her best yet. It is an exceptional read, told with elegance, nuance and an admirable subtlety. The narrative is split across three timelines: 1959, the 1980’s and 2020. This could have felt convoluted, yet it is pitched and paced perfectly, each section distinct but connected by main character, Annie, who is haunted by her past actions and her complicity in something unthinkably cruel.

Hold Back the Night covers some harrowing subjects, including the devastating loss and injustice present during the AIDS crisis. However, it is not an unrelentingly depressing read. There is, of course, sadness and anger but there is also hope to be found. This is a book that shows the complexities and the power of love in all its forms – friendship, companionship, family, desire and humanity. It is about redemption, complicity, guilt, compassion and the responsibility humans have to one another. A beautifully written, truly heartbreaking yet somehow still delicately hopeful book that I could not recommend more highly.

Lock-down in 2020 brings its own brand of isolation and indecision and left with just her thoughts Annie is taken back in time firstly to 1959 when she and her friend Rita were student nurses at Fairlie Hall Mental Hospital. With an incompassionate matron who ruled with a rod of iron, Annie and Rita were given tasks which they neither knew nor understood. Moving forward in time we meet Annie in the 1980s when another unknown epidemic was wiping out a specific population and with a house far too big for Annie and her daughter, Annie offers a place of refuge to those who were being shunned in society and considered unworthy of human kindness.

Stark, often brutal its depiction of life, this emotive novel took me right back to my own student nurse days and more particularly to nursing in the 1980s when no-one, unless you were actually there, could understand the fear and ignorance which surrounded this particular time in medical history. I had such an emotional connection to Annie, often seeing myself in her when I too would obey instructions with little knowledge of the far reaching consequences. Although different times calls for different measures this cleverly controlled novel links together three very specific eras and gives them a common thread, that of a disease out of control, the ignorance which surrounded medical treatments and in particular mental illness, and of the isolation borne of fear.

Hold Back the Night is a difficult book to 'enjoy' as the subject matter is a tough read but it's all sensitively handled and very well written and is definitely a story which will stay with me for a while.

There is a scene that takes place in 1959, where Annie and Ruth are asked to assist with a patient who is having electric therapy (or electric shock treatment as we know it today). Along with one of the interns they have to hold her down, while she is ‘shocked’. I had to stop reading. My mother had this treatment in the 50s. I never knew they had to be held down. She later had a leucotomy and this also occurs at Fairlee Hall, where the girls are training to be ‘mental nurses’.

In the side wards, patients are receiving treatment to make them ‘normal’. This, we discover later on, was a means of treating homosexuals with emetics and images of young men, all designed to deter them. The alternative was prison as it was still illegal to be actively gay in the UK until 1967. Alan Turing was chemically castrated in 1952 for homosexual acts, again as an alternative to prison.

As student nurses, Annie and Ruth have to do as they are told, but at what point do they question the rules and ask themselves if what they are doing is wrong. Are they complicit in something morally questionable? Many years ago I worked in a nursing home where dementia patients were forced to use the toilet with two HCAs holding them down and removing their clothing. I was very upset about it. Nowadays, it would be considered an assault.

In 1983, Annie is widowed and is a single mother to 13-year-old Rosie. One day she meets a young man named Robbie and his older friend Jim, and gives them a home when no-one else will, because this is the AIDs crisis, and homosexual men are shunned by society, people terrified of ‘catching’ it. And Annie needs the rent money from all her spare rooms. But soon her home becomes a haven for those dying of AIDs, and mostly they do. Sometimes their own parents have shunned them as well as society.

It’s 2020 and it’s the time of the pandemic. The country has been locked down. I usually hate stories that take place during the pandemic, but it’s necessary here to draw parallels with the AIDs crisis in the 80s. How they were dealt with and how much has changed.

Annie is now in her eighties. She lives alone. She talks to Rosie every day on the phone. Rosie thinks she should come to stay with her, that she is too vulnerable on her own. She also talks to Jim, who of all her lodgers, has survived AIDs, though he will always be HIV positive.

The book is not written in that order though. We start with a phone call in 2020, and then move around the timelines as the story progresses. It’s a very powerful novel that questions whether following the rules is always the right thing to do, even when we know it’s wrong, and can we atone by trying to right the wrongs. Even though the 1959 parts were hard for me to read, I really enjoyed the book (if that’s the right word).

Many thanks to @Tr4cyF3nt0n for inviting me to be part of the #CompulsiveReaders #blogtour and to NetGalley for an ARC.

Hold Back the Night is a powerful and emotion-charged story of one woman’s sixty-year journey from complicity and betrayal to atonement and ultimately redemption. It’s a riveting read, exposing shameful truths from the past that most people today will be ignorant of.

Annie’s story is told over three timelines, starting with Covid lockdown in 2020, when news of the death of a friend, sends her mind spiraling back to the past — to 1959, when she worked as a junior nurse in a mental institution. And to the early 1980s, when as a young widow and single mum, she provided lodgings and care to young men dying of AIDS.

Through Annie, Jessica Moor writes unflinchingly about the barbaric practice of conversion therapy, which was inflicted on gay men to ‘cure’ them of their ‘condition’, and of the abandonment of the same group two decades later at the start of the AIDS pandemic.

I loved Annie’s character arc, which sees her start off as a naïve and compliant 19 year-old, following orders and assisting in the conversion treatments. Although complicit, she does have a sympathetic side and tries to make life easier for the men. But, it’s not until many years later that she faces up to her guilt.

Offering up her home to AIDS victims begins as a mutual convenience: Annie needs lodgers, and they need a refuge. But she goes above and beyond the obligations of a landlady. Whether this is Annie subconsciously seeking atonement or just her compassionate nature isn’t clear, but I found it wonderful to see her act so selflessly and find a new purpose in life.

Redemption finally comes in the closing chapters, when Annie gets the chance to make peace with the actions of her younger self. This was full-on, lump-in-the-throat stuff and a fitting end to what was an engaging and eye-opening read.

If you’ve read and been moved by Ruth Coker Burks’ heart-wrenching memoir, All the Young Men, then Hold Back the Night is for you.

Hold Back the Night is a beautifully rich sumptuous story, following nurse Annie’s life through three key stages of her life and three recent historic events.

It covers her 20s in 1959 when she was a nurse in a mental health facility and meets her best friend Rita. They start off working on cavernous wards full of dementia patients, 50 or 60 in a room , some of whom have been there since childhood and become dreadfully institutionalised. It reminded me of Maggie O’Farrell ‘The vanishing act of Esme Lennox’.

Annie and Rita are specially selected to help with treating men for their homosexuality, in a time when it was considered utterly deviant to be gay .

The story moves to the early 80s where widowed Annie is living with her teenage daughter Rosie. A chance encounter in a hospital waiting room makes her see how badly society still treats gay men, particularly if they may have AIDs. Annie starts offering shelter to young men with HIV when they have nowhere else to go.

Finally we see Annie as an 80 year old in the early days of Covid, being careful to take her prescribed walk but staying isolated and safe. She finds out that Rita has died and it’s clear that the two have drifted over the decades although we don’t know why.

The three timelines are intertwined and we jump between the 50s to 2020 and back again, learning more about Annie and her life choices as we go. At times Annie blindly follows instructions, trusting that society is making the right decisions or trusting her husband to make the right choices but at other times she ploughs her own furrow, as she chooses to support and house the gay men despite her neighbours’ objections. It’s a tale of how past actions can play out in ways that you might never anticipate, taking you in unexpected directions and decisions.

Hold Back the Night is a mature look at one woman’s life and how her choices have shaped her& others, definitely worth a read.

This is a novel with a complex narrative, so you have to concentrate, but it’s worth the effort. Set in 3 timescales it’s a story of friendship, love, prejudice and imperfect people doing the best they can.

This was an intense read. I have seen comments that Annie was too distant and cold a narrator but I liked that she was almost a bystander, unable and sometimes unwilling to do anything to change things, as this was the reality - so many people did turn a blind eye or go along with the status quo.
I thought it was brilliantly written and would make a great tv drama.

Hold Back The Night is a story about Annie. A nurse. It's a narrative of her life in the 50s as a mental health nurse in Fairlie Hall. In the 80s she becomes a landlady to a host of sick young men. And, now in 2020 she is looking back at her life.

The themes in this story are heavy. Jessica Moor the author relays through Annie's story themes of mental health, AIDS, conversion therapy and the whole history of society and its homophobia. I really enjoyed, if that is the right word for it. The look into the 1950s and how doctors went about treating men who merely didn't conform to the social norm of loving a woman. Some scenes in the book are harrowing but it's a fact that this actually happened.

In the 1980s narrative. Annie takes in men and young boys who are dying from AIDS. Again Moor touches on how society was back then. How people perceived those with HIV. A virus that was feared among many.

The only thing I didn't get from this book was raw emotion. I thought I'd be in tears reading. But, I think because Annie herself was a cold character it made it hard to invest emotionally into the story.

Now, Rita on the other hand I really enjoyed her character. And would have loved to read more about her. She seemed more in tune with what was going on in Fairlie Hall and in a way she was light years ahead of her contemporaries. Annie should have been more Rita. But, this also showed how easily people see things differently.

Hold Back The Night dealt with some hard hitting topics and it does make you feel glad that we have come a long way in our thinking. Thankfully.

Oh my days, this book nearly broke me...
We start in March 2020 - at the beginning of lockdown. Annie lives alone and has way too much time on her hands. She starts to think back on her life, as I think we all did at that time, I certainly did! This reminiscing steps up a gear when she receives a phone call informing her of the death of her old friend, Rita. And so we go back... to 1959 when Annie first met Rita when they both started work at Fairlie Hall mental hospital as second year placement nurses.
We also delve into the 1980s at a time when Annie has just lost her husband who died suddenly in a tragic work accident. A chance encounter has her opening up her home to a young man who is ill. Her nursing skills a bit rusty but the intention still being strong.
And so begins a rather emotionally harrowing story which encompasses the conversion/aversion therapy of the late 50s, as well as the much better known AIDS crisis of the 80s. It's all a bit shocking for those who had little idea of the real impact this stuff had on people. I am more familiar with the latter than the former but I did a bit of googling and was extremely shocked at what I discovered outwith this story.
The way that the author has constructed the book, the way she weaves the three timelines around and about each other is absolutely perfect. We get the story progressing in the present day with explanation and background delivered by the injection of the past.
The story contained herein is very characters driven and boy does this author write some great characters. I have already seen this in her previous books, The Keeper and Young Women, and the ones in this book are no exception to this.
One thing to also mention is that despite the harrowing themes that this book includes, it never gets too dark. There is always a light shining out, always some hope, and the tears I shed during reading it were both tears of joy as well as sorrow. Yes I did get a bit over involved in the characters' lives. Hard not to when they are so compelling and easy to connect to.
And the ending was just perfect, and really fitted what had gone before. You'll see when you get there yourself.
All that's left is to wonder what the author will have in store for next time and hope it'll be soon. My thanks go to the Publisher and Netgalley for the chance to read this book.

Unfortunately this book wasn't for me and I DNF'd it. Just me as a person not the book, topics in here I'm just no interested in.