In Day Brings Back the Night, three episodes in a family’s life unfold across decades, each shaped by memory, longing, and the mysteries of love. In 1989, Helen stands at the threshold of a new beginning yet cannot shake the trauma of an oppressively painful past. Years later, Tom and Amanda journey north into Minnesota’s Boundary Waters, where silence, grief, and tenderness open old emotional terrain—and where the wilderness begins to reveal what the family cannot. By 2023, the family returns to the wilderness, drawn together by what has endured and what remains unresolved. Told in three intimate movements, this lyrical and psychologically rich novel explores the afterlife of pain, the bonds between parents and children, and the difficult grace of forgiveness without forgetting.

Duren has composed this novel as a song, a melody that carries from generation to generation the voices, visions, and scars a family has grown up with and will never leave behind.

—Cass Dalglish, novelist, Ring of Lions, and poet, Humming the Blues / Cantando los Blues (a boca cerrada)