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The Meaning of Night: A Confession Audio CD – Audiobook, January 1, 2006

by Michael Cox (Author)
4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 498 ratings
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Unabridged CD Audiobook 19 CDs / 22.5 Hours long
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  1. Language
    English
  2. Publisher
    Recorded Books
  3. Publication date
    January 1, 2006
  4. ISBN-10
    1428124888
  5. ISBN-13
    978-1428124882
  6. See all details
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Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Recorded Books; Unabridged 19 CDs edition (January 1, 2006)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1428124888
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1428124882
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.15 pounds
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 498 ratings

About the author

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Michael Cox

Michael Cox

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Michael Cox is the biographer of the ghost-story writer and scholar M. R. James. His first novel, The Meaning of Night, was shortlisted for the 2007 Costa First Novel Award. He lives in rural Northamptonshire, England.

Customer reviews

4.1 out of 5 stars
4.1 out of 5
498 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Charla Wilson
5.0 out of 5 stars Obssessive Revenge!
Reviewed in the United States on July 31, 2011
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Wow! This is THE Best Book I have read in a long time, possibly one of the Best of this genre I will ever read! I will even go beyond what others are saying in comparing him to Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, etc., and say that in many ways he is Better!

This is Edward Glyver's story, or rather it is Edward Glyver aka Edward Glapthorn's story and it is told by him. It starts out with him commiting a murder and the excitement just builds from there. Edward Glyver believes his birthright has been stolen and he is obssessed with regaining it. There is almost nothing he will not do to get one step closer to his claim. Even though Edward has a dark spot in his character, your heart will still go out to him. He has been ecieved by almost everyone he ever loved. Everytime he finds happiness, he seems to be struck down. The things this gentleman edures is enough to drive anyone mad. Even though he is full of revenge and teeter tottering on the brink of madness, he has a good, kind heart in his chest. He has just enough goodness within him to cause you to fall in love with him Edward is truly a man after my heart. He is a bibliophile, and a photographer. I love old photography and I loved reading about his photographic endeavors. I also loved the history in this story. It is full of it, and anything that needs more explaining is included in a footnote.
For my full review, please visit my blog at: [...]
3 people found this helpful
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Daniel Myers
4.0 out of 5 stars Watchman, what of the night?
Reviewed in the United States on August 26, 2007
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I liked this book. I liked the Victorian atmospherics heaped on in shovelfuls. I liked the characterisations. I liked the plot. I liked the trope of the whole thing being a piece of obscure Victoriana dug up and carefully edited and footnoted, and I would even recommend it to devotees of what The Washington Post reviewer calls "Victorian noir."--But for some reason the book failed to truly grip me. There are probably a multitude of reasons for this failure to excite or inspire or to touch any depths, but I think the main one is that it kept reminding me of other books and literary personages. Two in particular:

1. Bleak House-Really, I think that if you enjoy this sort of thing, you should read the original "Victorian noir" masterpiece. Dickens's characters are certainly more two dimensional than Cox's - fittingly for a modern writer - more complex characters whose identities are continually shifting between the dark and light in them. I didn't find this the least off-putting, as other reviewers complain, but rather the opposite. Otherwise, this would be but a pale copy of Dickens and probably would not have seen print. But Dickens's "grotesqueries", as they are frequently alluded to, though two dimensional considered apart from the vast novel, when combined in the reading of a book make for a tale where light and dark are much more striking and, perhaps ironically, more powerful when internalized in the reader's imagination. All this is to say that one comes away from Dickens's work with a more indelible imprint of the depths and heights of human nature, than from Cox's, where the multi-faceted nature of what is called "identity" is on modern, three-dimensional display.

2. Richard Savage-Probably never heard of him, have you? Nobody would probably have heard of him had not Johnson (Samuel) written the Life of Richard Savage and, afterwards, included it in his Lives of the Poets. ---See if this strikes a familiar chord: Poet claims to have been disowned by his aristocratic mother and, thus, deprived of his birthright. Poet spends much of his youth wandering the streets of 18th Century London with his soon to be famous (but then unknown) companion Samuel Johnson. Poet is befriended and patronised by men of letters and members of the aristocracy sympathetic to his (supposed, never corroborated) claim and plight. Poet publishes his masterpiece "The Wanderer", a poem in which life is reduced to a drawn out, haunting, nocturnal peregrination through the purlieus of London. The increasingly paranoid Poet commits murder in a tavern brawl. He is tried and found guilty, but escapes the noose by intervention of a Royal pardon, one of the three judges in the case wryly stating, and I can't resist quoting in full, "Gentlemen of the jury, you are to consider that Mr. Savage is a very great man, a much greater man than you or I, gentlemen of the jury; that he has abundance of money in his pocket, much more than you or I, gentlemen of the jury; but, gentlemen of the jury is it not a very hard case, gentlemen of the jury, that Mr. Savage should therefore kill you or me, gentlemen of the jury?"-Savage soon met his end in debtor's prison, having alienated all his patrons through his paranoid fixation of being denied his birthright and that those who befriended him were actually in conspiracy against his reclaiming of it. On almost every page of this book, I was reminded of Savage.

Well, I suppose I seem to have digressed. But the point of these two references is to convey my persisting sense throughout the reading of this work that it just wasn't quite the real thing. And perhaps, after all, Cox intended me to feel so.

To conclude, read it anyway. It's a far, far better thing than any book of this genre that I've yet to cast my eyes on.
10 people found this helpful
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Gary C. Marfin
5.0 out of 5 stars An engaging read
Reviewed in the United States on May 4, 2008
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Other reviewers have conveyed well this book's intricate plot. Still, it might be worth asking: Why did Mr. Cox decide to plant this mystery in the Victorian era? Perhaps it's enough to say that Cox has a fondness for Dickens and the period generally. He certainly will not have been the first. Might there be other reasons? Besides, it is not just Michael Cox; other modern authors have traveled back to that setting as well (see, The Crimson Petal and the White). Why? To be begin with, working in that era allows Cox to move from the rural to an urban setting, and perhaps the lines were between those two settings were more fluid in that era than they are today. Second, Victorian London appears, not unlike other cities today, to consist of an "upper world" of ordinary, albeit important, exchange, and a proverbial underworld of drugs and prostitution and, of course, the foul play that opens the pages of this book. Finally, the era permits Cox and other novelists at home in a world over a century old, to make use of the language of the period, where characters are developed and settings described with precision and, importantly, neither is hurried. The Meaning of Night allows its readers to explore the mystery -- in this case a mystery of identity -- at a pace and level of complexity and nuance that Victorian readers had come to expect and for which more modern readers, apparently, retain an appetite.
5 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

ESLGray
5.0 out of 5 stars The seller packaged this book beautifully
Reviewed in Canada on May 11, 2020
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The book arrived much later than expected through no fault of the seller. The book is in beautiful shape. Thank you!
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Malabika Roy
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in India on July 16, 2018
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Excellent read. A must for mystry lovers.
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Dr. Robert A. Josey
5.0 out of 5 stars superb
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 24, 2008
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It took me a little while to get around to reading this. I love Victorian fiction but was somewhat overwhelmed by all the hype surrounding the book at the time - and kept back from it until I felt that I could approach the novel on my own terms. The text alone - not the website, the adverts, etc. (And then there was the inevitable backlash against the hype, tearing the book and the author down.)

So, freed of all those distractions by not paying them any attention, I found 'The Meaning of Night' beguiling, unputdownable and a damn good read. I'm not going to add to all the previous superlatives used in the positive reviews here - I just wanted to say that this fulfilled everything I desire in a book. One of the best books I have ever read actually.

As George Orwell once said in his essay on Dickens, the author's characters are not ones you can talk to or have conversations in your head with. Edward Glyver/Glapthorn/Duport however is an unconventional anti-hero - but you could imagine having a meaningful discourse with him.. And Emily Carteret is the seeming antithesis of a Dickensian heroine. Erudite, learned, discerning, with an inner mental life. Well...though...

Cox's writing style is rich and textured. There was nothing I skipped through - I read every word. His descriptions of Evenwood as some sort of faery demesne were a highpoint of the novel for me. Some writers can do architectural atmosphere, some can't. Cox knows how to conjure up a time and a place to great effect.

I am looking forward now, with much eagerness, to reading 'The Glass Of Time'.
5 people found this helpful
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ask
3.0 out of 5 stars Ok
Reviewed in India on November 3, 2018
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Not as good as expected....but not bad at all
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lila
3.0 out of 5 stars Good story but boring
Reviewed in Germany on January 2, 2015
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I kind of want to know the end but I can't stick to reading it as it's long winded and partially very boring. I bought it because the reviews were great, well guess it's not my style. Yet it's not terrible ...
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