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In her third novel, author Elizabeth Crook creates a transporting story of one family’s legacy over the course of one hundred years, stemming from the diaries of a frontier woman faced with the duties, passions, and dangers of her times.
In The Night Journal, the diaries of Hannah Bass have attracted the attention and devotion of academics and readers for decades. Candid and passionate, written in the 1890s, the journals offer the rare account of a woman in the American West during the Victorian era, a time of expansion, indiscriminant violence, and burgeoning industry.
Nearly a century later, the journals have been edited and published to great acclaim by Hannah’s only child, Claudia Bass, known to all as Bassie, now a retired professor of southwestern history and respected worldwide for her work transcribing her mother’s journals. Bassie’s granddaughter, Meg Mabry, however—a thirty-seven-year-old career woman who as a child was raised by Bassie and remains bitter toward Bassie’s domineering, caustic guardianship and the burden of her expectations—finds the very thought of the family legacy oppressive and refuses even to read the journals.
When Bassie learns that the hill on the property of her childhood home is going to be flattened to make room for modern expansion, she insists that Meg travel with her to New Mexico to recover the skeletal remains of two dogs her mother buried there. She recalls being awakened during the night to the sound of gunshots and remembers seeing her mother, Hannah, and a man named Vicente Morales take a pickax to the frozen ground and dig the grave for a dog shot by poachers. Driven and determined in her memory, Bassie refuses to let this one final and vivid image of her mother be bulldozed away.
But when the ground is excavated, far more than dogs’ bones are unearthed, and the discovery of what is buried in the grave sends Bassie and Meg on a search back through time to the turn of the last century and into the secret lives of Bassie’s mother and father—Hannah and Elliott Bass—and Vicente Morales. The journey shakes the foundation of the history on which Bassie has built her life and her long career and changes Meg’s perception of the past as well as her expectations for her own future. In the fabled landscape of her ancestry, Meg allows herself at last to read the journals and reconstruct the past, solving a shocking and confounding mystery. With the support of Jim Layton, the archaeologist involved in the excavation, she sets out to find the one missing journal—suspected to exist but never confirmed—that will detail the final year of Hannah’s life and shed light on the unexplained disappearance of Hannah’s husband, Elliott.
Both a fascinating historical epic of the Southwest and a searing personal story of one family’s coming to terms with its own past, The Night Journal is a contemporary love story and a historical mystery, depicting the conflict between cultures in New Mexico at the turn of the last century, between sexes both then and now, and inevitably the conflicts between generations. It is centered on the mystery of the contents buried in a dog’s grave, but the underlying, broader mystery is about connections between the past and the present and the ways in which people relate to their ancestors both in life and in legacy.
(Introduction provided by the publisher)
Elizabeth Crook is the author of two previous novels and has been published in anthologies and periodicals such as Texas Monthly and Southwestern Historical Quarterly. She has devoted most of the last decade to researching and writing this book.
Elizabeth Crook lived in Nacogdoches, Texas and then San Marcos, Texas with her parents and brother and sister until age seven when the family moved to Washington D.C., where her father was director of Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) for Lyndon Johnson. Two years later her father was appointed Ambassador to Australia and the family moved to Canberra. When they returned to Texas Elizabeth attended public schools in San Marcos, graduating from San Marcos High School. She attended Baylor University for two years and graduated from Rice University in 1982. She has written six novels: The Raven’s Bride and Promised Lands, published by Doubleday and reissued by SMU Press as part of the Southwest Life and Letters series; The Night Journal, published by Viking/Penguin; Monday, Monday, published by Sarah Crichton Books, of Farrar, Straus and Giroux; The Which Way Tree, published by Little, Brown and Company and currently in development for film with Pantherdog LLC and Picturehouse, and The Madstone. Elizabeth has written for periodicals such as Texas Monthly and the Southwestern Historical Quarterly and is co-writer, with Stephen Harrigan, of the screenplay for The Which Way Tree. She has served on the council of the Texas Institute of Letters and the board of the Texas Book Festival, is a member of Women Writing the West and Western Writers of America, and was selected the honored writer for 2006 Texas Writers’ Month. Her first novel, The Raven’s Bride, was the 2006 Texas Reads: One Book One Texas selection. The Night Journal was awarded the 2007 Spur award for Best Long Novel of the West and the 2007 Willa Literary Award for Historical Fiction. Monday, Monday was awarded the 2015 Jesse H. Jones award for fiction and named a 2014 Best Fiction Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews. The Which Way Tree was named by The Texas Center for The Book at the Texas State Library and Archives Commission as their 2024 Texas Great Read Adult Selection “to represent the state’s literary landscape” at the National Book Festival. Her prose has been called “deftly rhythmic, often wry, and impeccably crafted” (Texas Monthly), “confident and lyrical” (Kirkus), her “words as carefully chosen as pearls on a matched necklace,” (USA Today) and holding “the sustained power of a drumbeat” (Houston Chronicle). Her various books have been described as “one of the most powerful anti-war statements,” (Houston Post, on Promised Lands); and a “ripping adventure with a show-stopping finale” (Wall Street Journal, on The Which Way Tree.) The Madstone, “a wonderfully transporting tale of love in the Old West” (People) is described in the Houston Chron as “tender, violent, funny, and, like just about everything Crook writes, drenched in Texas history—not the mythological kind, but a deeply researched dive into largely forgotten details and dark corners.” In 2023 Elizabeth received the prestigious Texas Writer Award from the Texas Book Festival.
She currently lives in Austin with her family.
(Biography provided by the publisher and the author)
