A Dark and Stormy Night

To that which we give the name of Love, be it of the flesh or of God, is it ever less than divine?

In a space of mere hours, a life and faith in their entirety are to be re-lived by Simon Chance. 

One-time missionary and bishop, Chance had withdrawn in mid-life to research – and teach – his enduring mentor Dante, creator of The Divine Comedy. He is recently widowed, after the prolonged descent into dementia of his devoted wife Marigold, violinist and composer.

To recuperate, he is invited by a life-long confidante, Clare, to her son’s villa in the hills behind St Tropez in southern France, to join a house party of old friends from their university days, each now reaping the rewards of their worldly careers. The reunion coincides with the collapse of global banking confidence – and the playing-out of Clare’s own loss of love. Such is one weave of this narrative.

On a walk in the forest of the Massif des Maures surrounding the remote villa, in search of a church abandoned centuries ago, Chance loses his way – in a ‘dark wood’, as once experienced by Dante. The night turns wild. Such is a second weave.

Marigold has not been the only love of Simon Chance. The overwhelming liaison of his earlier life, pre-ordination, was with a student botanist. This very Evie, with her Parliamentarian spouse, is about to join the house party of Clare, her greatest friend.

A vital element in that searing, abandoned youthful liaison is yet to be reconciled with this scholar-cleric Chance has come to be. Now it rises to confront him. Here is the binding and defining weave of this night, unraveling in darkness, storm and dawn.

A N Wilson:
“This is a beautiful book.
“The Dante Scholar lost in a dark wood, the Bishop going into the darkness  where God is. The man who has experienced Love on so many levels, reliving  his past before confronting the great Empyrean...
“A Dark and Stormy Night is a superb achievement.”

Rowan Williams:
​“I was deeply engaged by the narrative … and its style of calm expansiveness.”

A E Harvey DD, Canon Emeritus of Westminster Abbey:
“A Dark and Stormy Night is a remarkable feat.
“I have no doubt it makes a strong claim to be placed in the annals of literature.”

Andrew Roberts:
“Tom Stacey again confronts life’s great issues in his superb new novel A Dark and Stormy Night. God and Mammon, music and faith, pain and bereavement, the passing of time and nature of friendship and grief, it opens with the hero getting physically lost in a forest in Provence at the time of the Great Crash. But is he spiritually lost too? All this plus Dante, pygmies and a brilliant twist in the tale. A Dark and Stormy Night is vintage Stacey.”